Hermes Kanban

hermes-kanban is Hermes Agent's durable multi-agent coordination board. Instead of treating collaboration as an in-memory swarm of temporary subagents, it stores tasks, comments, dependencies, workspace assignments, and worker state in a persistent SQLite-backed board shared across Hermes profiles.

Core idea

Hermes Kanban turns multi-agent work into a database-backed queue and state machine.

The durable objects are:

tasks with assignees and statuses
links between tasks
comment threads as handoff history
workspaces where workers operate
dispatcher claims and liveness signals

So every handoff becomes inspectable and resumable.

Why it exists

hermes-subagent-delegation is excellent for short-lived reasoning branches, but it breaks down when work must:

survive restarts
wait on human input
move between named agents over time
be audited later
accumulate a long-lived comment trail

hermes-kanban is Hermes's answer to that durability problem.

Profile-centered collaboration

A Kanban worker is not an anonymous child summary. It is a full Hermes profile with its own memory, skills, configuration, and identity.

That means the board coordinates named long-lived agents, not just ephemeral branches of one parent prompt.

Dispatcher model

A dispatcher loop watches the board, promotes ready tasks, reclaims stale claims, and spawns the assigned worker profile when work is ready.

Because the dispatcher normally runs inside the hermes-gateway, the board inherits the same persistent daemon substrate that powers messaging and cron delivery.

Tool-mediated worker protocol

Hermes workers do not coordinate through shelling out to a CLI wrapper. They use a dedicated kanban_* toolset to read tasks, post comments, heartbeat, block, or complete work.

This matters because it makes the board a first-class agent substrate, not just a shell-level queue bolted onto the side.

Kanban versus delegation

The distinction from hermes-subagent-delegation is fundamental:

delegation is a parent-owned synchronous fork/join call
kanban is a durable peer-readable work queue

Delegation returns results into the parent context and disappears. Kanban leaves a durable artifact trail that any authorized profile or human can inspect later.

Kanban versus cron

The distinction from hermes-cron is also important:

cron answers *when* an autonomous run should happen
kanban answers *how* multiple named agents coordinate across time

A cron job can create or monitor board work, but the board itself is the coordination memory.

Architectural consequence

hermes-kanban shows Hermes moving beyond "agent with tools" into agent operations infrastructure.

It combines:

durable state
named worker identities
explicit handoffs
dependency tracking
human intervention points
resumability after crashes or blocking conditions

This makes it one of the clearest examples of Hermes treating multi-agent collaboration as an operating system problem instead of a prompt-engineering trick.

References

Source: C:\Users\executor\AppData\Local\hermes\hermes-agent\website\docs\user-guide\features\kanban.md
Source: C:\Users\executor\AppData\Local\hermes\skills\autonomous-ai-agents\hermes-agent\SKILL.md