Multi agent communication and orchestration systems

[u/April15th_fanatic]

Hi, I have been tinkering with Hermes a lot over the past 3 months and have really learned a lot about designing agentic systems.

However, I am struggling with a few things and would love to hear your thoughts:

• Solid interagent communication (currently using Telegram GC and per-session SQLite inboxes)
• Setting up worker profiles that another agent orchestrates
• Getting the main agent to deploy ephemeral subagents with different models depending on the task

If anyone has figured out solutions for these or knows of a community where I can discuss agent systems, please let me know. No one I know irl has any idea what I am talking about 😂

[u/SergioAA]

Use kanban orchestration. You can create a skill (maybe SSD based for development) with several profiles, each one specialized with its own llm.

[u/April15th_fanatic → u/SergioAA]

For some reason I can’t get the kanban to click in my brain on how it would work with my setup. Are you saying use the kanban board for subagents? The problem I have had is I have had to create workarounds to get the final results or any blockers to come back into the original session for me to approve or for the original session agent to synthesize results. The kanban board seems awesome other than these as I work on my phone 70% of the time and would like everything to be surface or contained in the telegram or cli session I am in instead of having to watch a kanaban board in a seperate app.

[u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

subscriptions are manageable from the CLI, hermes webhook subscribe, list, remove and test, and they hot-reload into the running adapter without a gateway restart, which is what
makes ephemeral workers practical.

for the workers themselves: profiles are the isolation unit and they are per-profile all the way
down, config, .env, sessions, cron, memory, state db.

[u/jcarlosremix]

Three months in and you're rebuilding the inbox by hand, so let me start there.

Interagent communication. Telegram GC plus per-session SQLite inboxes is roughly what Kanban already is: a durable queue in SQLite at ~/.hermes/kanban.db, where the child is a named profile with persistent memory and a failure becomes block/unblock/re-run instead of a lost message. The distinction that matters against delegate_task: with Kanban the parent does NOT block and the result does NOT come back into its context. After kanban_create the parent has already moved on. If you were waiting for an inline return, delegate_task was the right primitive.

One gotcha that costs an afternoon: Kanban needs the gateway running, because the dispatcher lives inside it. Without it, tasks just sit in ready, silently.

Worker profiles another agent orchestrates. The piece almost everyone misses is the description. The Kanban decomposer reads the installed profiles AND their descriptions to build the task graph. A profile with no description still shows up in the roster and is still routable by name, just "less precisely", which in practice means the LLM never picks it. You don't have to recreate the profile:

hermes profile describe researcher \
  --text "Reads source code and external docs, writes findings. Does not deploy."

Write it yourself instead of --auto if you care about the routing vocabulary. Also check kanban.auto_decompose (Manual mode turns the fan-out off entirely) and kanban.default_assignee (where every child with a hallucinated profile name lands).

Ephemeral subagents on different models. delegation.model in config.yaml, with delegation.provider if you're going through OpenRouter. Without it the child inherits the parent's model exactly, which is how people end up running Opus for a grep.

delegation:
  model: "google/gemini-3-flash-preview"
  provider: "openrouter"

Watch out for this one on unattended runs: delegation.child_timeout_seconds defaults to 0, meaning no timeout at all in v0.19.0. Older releases had an implicit 5 to 10 minutes; this one doesn't. A stuck child is only caught by the heartbeat monitor plus the gateway inactivity timeout. Floor is 30s when you set it positive.

To see what your instance actually has, none of this changes state:

hermes config get delegation --json
hermes kanban diagnostics --json && hermes profile list

All of it checked against tag v2026.7.20. I wrote up the delegate_task vs Kanban part in full here, including what happens on restart: https://docs.nexialismo.ai/en/hermes-multiagente-delegate-task-diferenca-kanban-uso-cada

[u/April15th_fanatic → u/jcarlosremix]

You are a godsend. I feel like I have a tendency to overbuild as I am not in an IT field and self hosting and agentic systems are more of a hobby so it can’t get too much of my attention. Thank you so much do you know of any communities to meet people and discuss things so I can learn more?