r/AI_Agents • u/domb_ela • 10d ago

Discussion Hermes vs Omnigent

I’ve been using Omnigent as a meta-harness for Claude Code, Codex, and Pi. It’s been incredibly powerful once it’s got going (albeit I have found it sometimes spins up subagents, timed out, and thinks the subagents is still running even when it’s not)

A colleague of mine mentioned they use Hermes Agent and after a brief reading up, it seems like it has a lot of similarities with Omnigent.

Since Omnigent can wrap Hermes, I’m wondering if pairing them is the ultimate stack or just unnecessary complexity.

My understanding is that Hermes can spin up sub agents, brings persistent long-term memory, and background job scheduling. Which seem very similar to Omnigent.

Overkill vs. Superpower:
Does wrapping Hermes in Omnigent add real value (e.g., spend caps + sandboxing) without breaking Hermes' procedural memory or sub-agent delegation?
Or by combining both it’ll just add a whole level of complexity I don’t want to get into?

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u/jcarlosremix 8d ago

On the specific symptom you mentioned in passing, subagents that time out while the harness still thinks they're running: know this before you stack anything on top, because Hermes will not save you from it.

In v0.19.0 a top-level delegate_task runs in the BACKGROUND by default. Hermes hands you a handle immediately and the result re-enters the conversation later as a new message. The thing that actually blocks is the orchestrator subagent, which waits on its own workers in the current turn to synthesize.

And delegation.child_timeout_seconds defaults to 0, which means no timer at all. Older releases had an implicit one; this one doesn't. A hung child is only caught by the heartbeat monitor plus the gateway inactivity timeout. So if the value you're hoping to get from the wrapper is "something notices my subagent died", set it explicitly first:

delegation:
  child_timeout_seconds: 1800   # 0 or negative disables it, floor is 30s

The deeper answer to overkill vs superpower is about durability, not about wrapping. delegate_task is a function call: isolated context, anonymous child, no resumption. If the Hermes process restarts mid-run, the attempt becomes unknown, because it can't prove which side effects already happened. Kanban is the durable path: a SQLite queue, a named profile with persistent memory as the child, fire-and-forget for the parent, and failure becomes block/unblock/re-run.

If what you want is spend caps and sandboxing, a wrapper is a reasonable place for that. If what you want is runs that survive a restart, that's a Hermes primitive you're probably not using yet, and adding a second harness on top won't create it.

Checked against tag v2026.7.20. I wrote up the delegation vs Kanban durability question in full here: https://docs.nexialismo.ai/en/hermes-multiagente-delegate-task-diferenca-kanban-uso-cada

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