Nous Research Adds 3,200+ Animated Pets to Hermes Agent—Zero Functional Impact

According to Nous Research, Hermes Agent now includes pet support earlier this month, offering users over 3,200 animated sprite mascots from petdex, an open-source community gallery. The pets display six states reflecting agent activity: idle, running, thinking, waving, celebrating, and failing—but have zero effect on tokens, prompt caching, or agent behavior.

The feature renders across CLI, TUI, and the official desktop app, with support for advanced graphics protocols like kitty and WezTerm. On desktop, users can pop the pet into a floating, always-on-top window that displays status bubbles ("working," "thinking," "your turn") and notifies when tasks complete. Installation requires a single command, and switching pets is done via CLI selection.