Hermes Bot Mode: The Free Grok Bot Alternative

Hermes Bot Mode turns your sessions into a roster of named bots — each with its own avatar, memory, schedule and its own AI model. It’s free, open source, runs on your machine, and it does one thing Grok Bot won’t.

What Bot Mode is

Teknium — co-founder and lead engineer at Nous Research — released Bot Mode as a one-day public beta. You install it as a plugin, the community sends feedback, and then it ships inside the main Hermes desktop app for everyone.

When someone pointed out that it looks a lot like Grok Bot, Teknium answered with three words: that’s the point.

Until now, Hermes worked in sessions. You open a chat, give the agent a task, it does the work. Want a different task? Open another session. It works, but it gets messy fast — your inbox summary in one session, content research in another, competitor tracking in a third, all looking identical. Just a long list of chats with no faces, no names, no jobs.

Bot Mode flips that. Instead of a pile of sessions you get a roster: a panel down the left with named bots, each with its own avatar, personality, chat, memory and schedule. You click a bot and land in a chat like you’re messaging someone on your team.

Creating one takes seconds — a name, a title, a description of the job. And if you already have agent profiles set up, they automatically appear as bots the moment you install the plugin. You rebuild nothing.

The setting almost nobody will notice

When you create or edit a bot there’s an advanced section, and inside it you can pin a specific model to that bot.

So your research bot runs one model. Your writing bot runs another. Your inbox bot runs a small fast local model that never touches the internet. Every bot on your roster thinks with a different brain, and you choose each one.

That’s the piece Grok Bot doesn’t give you at all.

Each bot keeping its own separate memory matters more than it sounds. Your research bot remembers what it researched, your content bot remembers your style, and they don’t blur together. Each builds its own history like a team member who’s been in the role for months.

Bots that talk to each other

This is the feature that turns a roster into a team.

Every bot has a persistent inbox called the agent inbox, and bots can send messages to each other. When a message arrives it comes with attribution, so the receiving bot knows exactly which agent sent it. Each bot’s personality file teaches it the protocol, including how to reply.

Then there are mentions. Type an @ and a bot’s name in any chat — @researcher have a look at this — and the bot you’re talking to hands the message off, waits for the answer, and reports back in the same conversation.

In practice: you’re chatting with your main bot about a blog post. You type @researcher pull the latest facts on this topic. Your main bot passes it over, the researcher does the digging with its own memory and its own model, sends the answer back, and your main bot folds it into the draft. One conversation on your screen. Two agents did the work.

Someone has already taken their entire Grok Bot setup — a coordinator bot and all the worker bots underneath it — and had Hermes clone the whole structure into Bot Mode. Same team layout, rebuilt on free open-source software they fully control.

Routines: every bot gets a schedule

Each bot has its own routines panel. A routine is a recurring task on a schedule:

• Summarise my inbox every morning.
• Check my niche for new developments every day at noon.
• Pull fresh content ideas every Monday.

You attach the routine to the bot whose job it is, and the results land in that bot’s chat history. So when you wake up and click your inbox bot, the morning summary is already sitting there.

Under the hood these run on Hermes cron jobs — the scheduler Hermes already had. Nothing new was bolted on, which is the smartest design decision in the whole release.

Why the architecture matters

A bot in Bot Mode is just a Hermes profile. Profiles already existed — each one its own isolated setup with its own config, memory, skills, credentials and chat history, stored in its own folder on your machine.

Bot Mode is a new interface layered on top of that. No core patches, no background daemons running on your computer, no extra storage system. Teknium confirmed it directly when asked how it differs from profiles: it’s a new simplified experience for profiles.

Why should you care? Because plugins that try to work around a system eventually break when the system changes. This one only uses the standard surface Hermes already exposes. It’s the difference between a house built on the foundations and a treehouse nailed to the side.

Every bot also has a SOUL.md personality file defining how it talks, what it cares about and how it behaves — and cloning copies everything: config, skills, personality file, even memory. Spend weeks training a research bot that knows your business inside out, duplicate it, point the copy at a different project, and the new one starts with everything the original learned.

The avatars, which are sillier and more useful than they look

Each bot gets a little geometric face — seven shapes, ten colours — with blinking eyes that scan back and forth while the bot is working. You can upload your own image, generate an AI portrait, or give a bot a pixel pet that bounces next to its avatar while it’s busy.

It sounds like decoration. But when you’ve got six bots and three of them are mid-task, you can see at a glance who’s working. The moving eyes mean work is happening. It’s a status light with a personality.

How I’m actually using it

Inside my agent OS I already run named agents. Oracle watches competitors. Astros pulls keyword and content ideas from our search data. Apollo handles voice.

Before today those lived as separate profiles I hopped between. Bot Mode gives each of them a face, a chat and a schedule sitting side by side in one panel.

And now Oracle can message Astros directly when it spots a competitor moving on a keyword. That handoff used to be me copying and pasting between windows.

The honest limitations

It’s a beta and it isn’t completely smooth. Four things to know before you install:

1. It’s a desktop plugin. It has to be installed on the machine running the Hermes desktop app, not on your server. Early testers installed it on their home server and saw nothing. If your Hermes gateway lives on a VPS that’s fine — the desktop app connects to it remotely, and Teknium confirmed remote gateways work.
2. No group chats yet. You can’t put multiple bots in one conversation. It’s one bot per chat, plus messaging and mentions between them.
3. Bot-to-bot delivery isn’t an instant interrupt. When one bot messages another, the receiving bot sees it in its inbox the next time it runs. It won’t drop what it’s doing mid-task. Live interrupts are presumably on the list.
4. Deleting a bot isn’t in the interface, on purpose — you do it from the command line. That’s a safety choice so you can’t wipe a bot’s memory with a misclick.

None of these are dealbreakers. They’re the rough edges of something that went from idea to public beta at Nous Research speed.

“This is for developers”

Creating a bot is three clicks — name, title, description. The install is copying one folder onto the machine running the desktop app, and after the beta you won’t even do that because it ships built in.

The people struggling with Hermes a year ago were writing config files by hand. The people using it today are clicking a button that says new agent. That gap keeps shrinking, and it shrinks in your favour.

And look at what the routines actually are. “Summarise my inbox every morning” is not a developer task. Neither is “watch my market for new ideas” or “draft my weekly newsletter from these notes”. This is business automation wearing a technical badge.

FAQ

What is Hermes Bot Mode?

A free, open-source plugin that turns Hermes sessions into a roster of named bots, each with its own avatar, personality, memory, schedule and pinned model.

Is it really free?

Yes — MIT licensed, running on your own machine. Grok Bot, which it’s modelled on, is $200 and runs in xAI’s cloud.

Can each bot use a different model?

Yes, and it’s the standout feature. In the advanced section of each bot you pin a model — frontier, free, or a small local one. Grok Bot doesn’t allow this.

Do my existing Hermes profiles carry over?

Automatically. A bot is just a Hermes profile, so anything you’ve already set up appears as a bot the moment you install the plugin.

Can bots talk to each other?

Yes. Every bot has a persistent agent inbox, and you can use @mentions to hand a task to another bot and get the answer back in the same chat.

Where do I install it?

On the machine running the Hermes desktop app — not your server. Early testers installed it on a home server and saw nothing. Remote gateways still work fine.

Can I put several bots in one group chat?

Not yet. It’s one bot per chat for now, with messaging and mentions between them.

How do I delete a bot?

From the command line. It’s deliberately kept out of the interface so you can’t wipe a bot’s memory by accident.

The bottom line

Grok Bot showed everyone what an AI agent team looks like. Hermes Bot Mode just made that free, open source and yours — with per-bot models, per-bot memory and bot-to-bot messaging on top. It’s a beta with real rough edges, but the roster you set up now will have months of built-up memory by the time everyone else installs it.

About Julian Goldie

I run Goldie Agency, a 7-figure SEO agency, and teach this daily on a 400K+ subscriber YouTube channel. 240+ client projects on Upwork at a 100% job-success score, 10+ years through every major Google update. My systems are in the AI Profit Boardroom; my link building book is free here.