What Is Bot Mode and How to Navigate the Bots Pane

A Bot Is a Profile

Before exploring any interface element, one idea is worth understanding clearly: in Hermes, a bot is a profile. That is the complete architecture in one sentence.

Bot Mode does not introduce a separate agent system. It does not run background daemons or create extra storage. What it does is surface your existing Hermes profiles as a named roster with persistent identities, dedicated UI, and coordination features -- all built on top of the same configuration and memory system profiles already use. A bot has its own role, model, memory, skills, credentials, and chat history stored under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/ because those are exactly what a Hermes profile already stores.

The practical implication: every configuration pattern you know for Hermes profiles applies directly to bots. A bot's SOUL.md is the profile's SOUL.md. A bot's model pin is the profile's model setting. The only new layer is Bot Mode's interface, which organizes, presents, and coordinates those profiles in ways that an agent crew needs.

Bot Mode ships as a bundled plugin in the Hermes Desktop app and is enabled by default. It appears as a Bots tab in the left sidebar.

The Bots Pane

Clicking the Bots tab opens the Bots Pane -- a roster of every profile configured as a bot. Each row shows the bot's avatar, a preview of its most recent message, and a timestamp. The roster sorts by recent activity, so bots you have interacted with most recently appear at the top.

Key elements to know:

• Click a bot to open its canonical, persistent Bot Chat conversation. This is the primary workspace for interacting with a bot directly.
• Right-click a bot to access the context menu, which includes Sessions (browse the 200 most recent stored conversations for that bot), Hide Bot, and group management controls.
• Active Now strip appears at the top of the roster and shows bots that are currently working -- defined as gateway-busy or active within the last 90 seconds. This is a live view of which agents are running at any given moment.
• Search filters the roster as you type. Useful once your crew grows large enough that scrolling becomes slow.
• Hide Bot removes a bot from the visible roster without stopping it. Hidden bots continue receiving @mentions and running their routines. An eye toggle appears once any bot is hidden, allowing you to reveal hidden bots dimmed in the roster.

Canonical Bot Chat and the /compact Rule

Clicking a bot in the roster opens what Bot Mode calls the canonical Bot Chat. This is a persistent, single conversation that Bot Mode treats as the primary relationship between you and that bot. It is not a throwaway session -- it carries context, memory, and continuity across every interaction.

This creates one important constraint: typing /new or /reset inside a bot's canonical chat would fork the conversation into a scratch session, breaking the continuity Bot Mode is built around. To prevent this, the composer redirects those commands to /compact instead. The /compact command gives the bot fresh context -- clearing accumulated conversation weight -- without abandoning the canonical session. It is the correct way to reset a bot's context while preserving the relationship.

When you need a temporary scratch session with a bot, open one manually from the Sessions entry in the right-click context menu rather than using /new inside the canonical chat.

Enabling and Disabling Bot Mode

Bot Mode is a bundled Desktop plugin and is on by default. You can disable it entirely in Settings → Plugins → Bots. Flipping the toggle off causes the roster, the Routines pane, and the composer middleware to unregister immediately -- no restart required. Flipping it back on restores everything.

There is also a preference option to hide canonical Bot Chats from the regular sidebar session list. This keeps the main sidebar uncluttered when you have a large crew, since those conversations already appear in the Bots pane where they belong.