Video: "Hermes Agent V0.12 Just Changed AI Agents Forever!" by Julian Goldie on YouTube.
The Curator: what it actually does
Skills in Hermes are short files that define reusable workflows — how to summarise a document, how to structure a brief, how to check a piece of code. After a few weeks of active use, most setups accumulate stale, duplicated, or conflicting skills. Previously, keeping them tidy was manual work that most people did not bother with.
The Curator is a background agent — it runs on a seven-day cycle — that reviews the skill library, removes outdated entries, consolidates overlapping ones, and improves descriptions based on how each skill has actually been used. You do not trigger it manually; it just runs. The practical effect is that the agent stays consistent over time rather than gradually drifting as the skill library gets messy.
Google Meet and Spotify: what the new integrations mean
V0.12 adds native connections to both Google Meet and Spotify. On the face of it, Spotify in an AI agent seems like a novelty. In practice the integrations follow the same pattern as earlier app connections: the agent can now take actions in these platforms as part of a broader workflow, without needing a separate script or manual step.
The Google Meet integration is the more interesting one for business use. An agent can now schedule meetings, add agenda items, or pull notes from a Meet session as part of a task chain. Combined with the existing email and file management capabilities, Hermes can work across a larger part of a business day without needing to hand off to a human for the calendar pieces.
The scale of this release
213 contributors worked on V0.12. 1,096 code changes were merged. 360 bugs were fixed. That last number is worth pausing on — a release with 360 bug fixes is one where a lot of rough edges got smoothed out. Not every fix will be noticeable in day-to-day use, but stability improvements at this scale tend to reduce the frequency of frustrating, hard-to-reproduce failures.
The 57% faster startup is noticeable in practice. Hermes has always been usable for quick tasks, but the startup time made it slightly annoying to invoke for short jobs. That friction is largely gone now.
What has not changed
V0.12 does not change the fundamental architecture. Hermes is still an open-source, locally-run agent framework — your data stays on your machine, the model API calls go where you configure them, and there is no Hermes cloud service you are locked into. The Curator is a local background process, not a cloud feature.
The platform also still requires some technical setup. If you are not comfortable with the command line or managing configuration files, you will want help getting it running properly — especially if you want the Kanban board and Curator working together on real work.
Where this connects to NordSys
Hermes V0.12 is a better foundation than previous releases — the Curator alone is worth the upgrade for anyone who has been running Hermes for a few months and notices their skill quality has degraded. If you want Hermes properly configured for your specific workflows, or if you want the Kanban and Curator features set up without spending a weekend on it, that is exactly what we do. Our AI Agents service covers full setup, configuration, and ongoing support for Hermes and Claude Code.
See our AI Agents service →