Blank Slate, iMessage, and a Fleet of Agents - Hermes v0.17.0 Hits the Community

Hermes Agent v0.17.0 shipped on June 19 - 1,475 commits, ~800 merged PRs, 235,000 insertions, and 300+ closed issues across 1,693 changed files. Two days later, the community is deploying it in new ways.

The Reach Release

The release notes frame v0.17.0 as "The Reach Release" - extending Hermes to new channels, deeper tooling, and team-scale workflows.

iMessage via Photon. Hermes can now send and receive iMessage through Photon's managed line pool. No Mac relay, no BlueBubbles bridge. Run hermes photon login, authenticate with a device code, and Hermes lives in the blue bubbles. Three PRs (#32348, #42582, #44713) from @teknium1.

Blank slate profiles. Profiles now start with just a model, file ops, and terminal. Everything else - skills, MCP servers, toolsets - is opt-in. The dashboard gained a full profile builder where you pick model, skills, and MCP servers from a browser. No more hand-editing config.yaml to start clean.

Raft agent network. A new gateway channel connects Hermes to Raft's agent network through a wake-channel bridge. Set a profile, run the bridge, and Raft can wake Hermes to handle messages - metadata-only payloads, message bodies never cross the bridge.

Desktop upgrades. Rebindable keyboard shortcuts, native OS notifications with per-type toggles, live subagent watch-windows that stream delegated agent activity into its own pane, a composer model selector with per-model presets, automatic RTL/bidi text direction, a resizable VS Code-themed terminal pane, per-thread composer drafts, and the ability to install any VS Code Marketplace theme directly into the app. Multiple PRs from @teknium1. The desktop app shipped as a preview in v0.16.0; v0.17.0 deepened it into a daily driver across dozens of PRs.

Community Response

The community picked up the release in a few distinct directions.

Blank slate in practice. Zoe Park ( @zoepark_builds ) noted the blank slate mode would have saved 12 hours of disabling tools across three agents that only needed terminal and file ops. "Sometimes less is more when you know your workflow."

Grok as a provider. Chuks ( @Chuksdakingz ) shared a workflow for using an X Premium subscription as a Grok provider on Hermes Agent - no xAI API credits needed, no credit card, access persists as long as the subscription is active. The thread drew 783 impressions.

Hermes Desktop for remote access. Brad Mills ( @bradmillscan ) connected his MacBook Air to agents running on a Mac Studio via Hermes Desktop. Previous approach was Telegram + topics. "This is slick."

Open-source agent fleet. Curva Frogs ( @onlyfr0gs ) open-sourced a fleet of 10 specialist Hermes agents - accounting, legal, design, trading, security - on GitHub. Fork, customize, deploy on VPS. Built on Hermes Agent.

Local deployment. beamnxw ( @beamnxw ) documented a full Hermes Agent stack running on a Minisforum mini-PC. 28 likes, private 24/7 automation without cloud inference costs.

Mainstream acknowledgment. The Information ran a piece noting Hermes recently eclipsed OpenClaw in new GitHub contributors over the last 30 days.

By the Numbers

The release went live June 19. The community is already deploying, extending, and building on top of it.