hermes-lite takes the open-source Hermes Agent, strips it to a focused local coding tool, then…

By sfffs · Hacker News · March 9, 2026

hermes-lite takes the open-source Hermes Agent, strips it to a focused local coding tool, then extends it with:

Rust FSM — PyO3 state machine replacing the Python conversation loop (12 states, 5 actions)
Rust SessionDB — rusqlite + FTS5 + WAL replacing the Python SQLite layer
Native TUI — ratatui terminal UI with multi-agent panes, @mentions, delegation, and inter-agent routing
Persistent memory — global + project-level memories shared across all swarm agents via filesystem
Skills system — reusable expertise modules agents load on demand for specialized tasks
Subprocess protocol — JSON-over-pipes connecting TUI to Python agent processes
Integration test suite — 26 live end-to-end tests driving the agent via subprocess protocol

— sfffs, 2026-03-09, in the Hacker News thread “Open source Claude Code swarms WTF”.

Mentioned in this story

• Claude Code

  Skills

• #user-story
• #hn-comment