Hermes group chat earns an 8.1 out of 10 from me: it is the most controllable multi-bot room I've seen documented, held back by a short per-turn memory and a few v0.22.6 features that still lack a how-to.
The feature lets two to six Hermes bots, each a separate profile with its own model, share one conversation and deliberate in rounds.
Version 0.22.6, released 2 Nov 2026, lists four Desktop group chat additions: rename, disband, mentions and attachment paste.
The ratings below are my editorial judgement from the official docs and release notes, criterion by criterion.
If you want help deciding whether it fits your stack, book a free SEO strategy session with my team.
The Scorecard
| Criterion | Score /10 | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Setup effort | 8 | Bot Mode ships in Desktop and is on by default; a room needs only New Group Chat and 2–6 bots. |
| Roster and navigation | 9 | Rooms get their own rows with avatars, count, preview, timestamp and a needs-you badge, plus pins, sections and manual order. |
| Turn control | 9 | Mentions scope each round, bots may pass, and hard caps of 10 messages and 3 rounds per send stop loops. |
| Human-in-the-loop | 9 | @user escalation, in-room one-click approvals and a Stop that holds members until released. |
| Context handling | 6 | Each turn sees only about 200 messages or 32,000 characters since that bot's last turn. |
| Durability | 8 | Same-gateway rooms keep running after Desktop closes, and rooms mirror to every connected gateway. |
| Cross-machine rooms | 7 | New rooms managed by one gateway only offer that connection's bots; mixed rooms survive as legacy. |
| Documentation of v0.22.6 changes | 6 | Rename, disband and mentions are documented; attachment paste appears only as a line in the release notes. |
| Extensibility | 8 | An on_room_member_activity plugin hook exposes member tools, approvals and streamed text. |
Average of the nine rows: 7.8; my overall 8.1 weights turn control and human oversight higher, because those decide whether a room is safe to leave running.
What You Are Actually Rating
A Hermes bot is a profile: its own config, memory, skills, credentials and chat history under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/.
Bot Mode is the Desktop layer that turns those profiles into a roster, and group chats are rooms inside that roster.
You create a room through New Group Chat, or by right-clicking a local bot, choosing Manage groups and creating one inline.
Your message then drives up to three serial rounds of turns; mentioned bots answer, everyone answers if no one is mentioned, and the room settles after a silent round.
That structure is the core of the verdict: deliberation is bounded by design.
Strength: Rounds That Can't Run Away
Multi-agent chats often fail by talking forever.
Hermes caps a single send at 10 messages and 3 rounds, and lets every bot pass when it has nothing new.
The docs are explicit that not every bot replies to every message, and that mentioning specific members scopes the round to them.
For native server-hosted rooms, the configuration reference lets you lift those ceilings with hosted_rooms.discussion.max_rounds and max_messages, still bounded and still under Stop and approval gates.
That combination of tight defaults and a documented dial is why turn control scores a 9.
Strength: You Stay In The Loop Without Babysitting
Bots escalate real judgement calls with @user, which lights the room's needs-you badge in the roster.
Pending questions and command approvals light the same badge.
Approvals answer on the click itself, with once, session, always or deny.
Stop cancels queued work and holds members; a text stop only counts when it sits next to a bot's mention, so ordinary prose never freezes a bot by accident.
A held bot still receives every message it skipped once you release it.
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Strength: A Roster That Scales To Many Rooms
Rooms sit in the Bots roster as Discord-style rows beside bot rows, sorted by pins first and recent activity second.
A row shows stacked member avatars, member count, the latest room line, a timestamp and the needs-you state.
You can pin a room, file it into a section, drag it onto a heading, or move it up and down among rooms.
A bot in several rooms keeps one DM row, so the list grows by rooms, not by duplicates.
Opening a room takes over the main chat window as a tab in current builds; older ones open it in the bots side panel.
Strength: Mentions And Identity Read Cleanly
Mentions are where v0.22.6 points its attention, and the docs already show a careful design.
In a room transcript, a routed @bot, the human handoff @user, and the broadcasts @everyone and @all render as inline accent text, not pills.
Unknown @words and email addresses stay plain, so a pasted address never routes a message by mistake.
Hovering a message gives Reply to @handle, which seeds that tag so your next send reaches only that bot.
When two same-named bots from different connections share a room, tags become device-qualified, such as @reviewer-mini and @reviewer-local.
Renaming a bot keeps it taggable: a friendly name like Research Buddy becomes @research-buddy, and the old profile name still resolves.
Rooms also pull each member's title and avatar from its owning connection, so re-titling a bot updates every room it sits in.
When two members would still look identical, Activity rows add the connection label.
Small details, but they are exactly what stops a six-bot room from becoming confusing.
That is why the roster and turn-control rows both score a 9.
Strength: Rooms Survive Closed Windows And Dead Gateways
When all members share one gateway, that gateway schedules turns through a durable driver, so quitting Desktop doesn't stop a discussion.
Each room's recent transcript, members, picture and name are mirrored into every gateway your Desktop connects to, with per-gateway versioning so two Desktops merge instead of overwrite.
If a gateway dies, connected Desktops keep the full room locally and re-seed it on reconnect.
Disbands are durable too: a disbanded room is gone on every client, and your Desktop remembers its own disbands so a stale gateway copy can't revive it.
Limit: Per-Turn Memory Is Short
This is the lowest-scoring area.
A member's turn includes room messages since its last turn, capped at whichever limit it hits first: roughly 200 messages or 32,000 characters.
One huge message is trimmed to an 8,000-character excerpt, and the prompt states how many earlier messages were left out.
Each member also keeps a hidden room session that can swell until the bot returns empty replies; the fix is a per-member Compress history button in Group settings.
The workaround is simple: keep long source material in one bot's own Bot Chat and post only its summary into the room.
Another partial fix is that whatever a member says in its room session from outside, from the CLI or a routine, is posted into the room log once under that member's name.
None of this is hidden, which I credit, but it means rooms suit short, focused deliberation better than long document work.
Limit: v0.22.6 Isn't Everywhere Yet
The v0.22.6 release says the installer builds of Desktop (.exe and .dmg) get no change in this release and update with the next bundled one.
The CLI updates with hermes update, the Microsoft Store app through the Store, and Docker via the :stable tag.
Release notes for the window are short on purpose; curated notes arrive with v0.23.0.
Attachment paste in particular has no documented behaviour yet, so I rate it only as listed, not as described.
Limit: Cross-Machine Rooms Are Narrower Than Before
New Group Chat now checks how the active gateway runs rooms, and gateway-managed groups only offer bots on the active connection.
Older Desktop rooms keep mixed-machine members, shown with a device badge such as dixie · Mac Mini.
The multi-connection guide explains the reasoning: crossing a backend changes filesystem, credentials, tools and trust, so it should be an explicit bridge.
Direct bot mentions and delegation also stay gateway-local by default.
Sensible, but it caps the score at 7 for anyone hoping to mix a home server bot and a cloud bot in one new room.
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Who Should Use It
- Operators who already run two or more Hermes profiles with distinct jobs, such as a researcher and a reviewer.
- Teams who want a draft-then-check loop in one visible thread rather than copying text between chats.
- Builders who want to pair different models, since each bot can pin its own model and provider.
- Plugin authors who want room activity through the hooks system.
Who Should Skip It
- Anyone with one-step tasks; a single Bot Chat is simpler.
- Long-document workflows that need every bot to see the full history each turn.
- Installer-build Desktop users who need the v0.22.6 group chat changes today.
- People looking for a Telegram or Discord group bot: that is the messaging gateway, governed by
group_sessions_per_user, a separate feature.
How It Compares With Delegation And Plugins
A room is visible deliberation: every member's reply lands in one transcript.
Delegation, by contrast, hands a task to a subagent and returns the result; a sibling guide on Hermes delegation covers that pattern.
If you are still choosing extensions for those bots, our ranking of the best Hermes agent plugins is the companion read.
Pick rooms when you want to watch specialists disagree; pick delegation when you only want the answer.
Final Verdict
Overall: 8.1 out of 10.
The room design gets the hard parts right: bounded rounds, clear escalation, approvals in place, and durability across closed windows and lost gateways.
The per-turn context window and the undocumented paste feature keep it from a 9.
Run it now on the CLI or Store build, or wait for the next bundled Desktop release if you installed from the .dmg or .exe.
For trainings on building the bots that go in the room, the AI Profit Boardroom walks through it step by step.
Also On Our Network
- 🌐 The seven-step operator setup for a multi-bot room, mentions and fixes
- 🌐 Whether a room of AI bots pays off for a shop, firm or agency
- 🌐 Five copy-paste prompts that run a council of bots in your Agent OS
- 🌐 Which AI model to seat in each bot chair, by real GoldieBench scores
- 🌐 The complete Hermes group chat guide on the AI Profit Boardroom blog
FAQ: Hermes Group Chat Verdict
What is the biggest weakness of Hermes group chat?
Per-turn context. Each bot sees room messages since its last turn only up to about 200 messages or 32,000 characters.
Is the attachment paste feature documented?
Not yet. The v0.22.6 release notes list it, and the curated notes for that window are due with v0.23.0.
Can I change the 3-round limit?
For native server-hosted rooms, yes: hosted_rooms.discussion.max_rounds and max_messages in the root config.yaml. They do not apply to Desktop renderer-driven or mirrored rooms.
Is a room the same as delegation?
No. A room shows every member reply in one shared transcript, while delegation hands work to a subagent and returns a result.
Who should not bother with it?
Anyone running single-step tasks, or workflows where every bot must see the full long history on every turn.
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About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.
I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.
- I've built a 7-figure SEO and link building agency, Goldie Agency, with a team of 70+ SEO experts.
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Seat a drafter and a reviewer in one room this week, judge it on a real task, and book a free strategy session if you want a second verdict on your Hermes group chat.
