Hermes 0.23.0 Update Experience: The Entire Workbench Moves into the Browser, and I Helped It Shed 6GB Along the Way Main Text Anyone who uses AI Agents to get things done has probably had the same feeling lately: the more you use this thing, the harder it is to live without it—but its "weight" on your hard drive has also quietly spiraled out of control. In my case, it was twofold—last week Hermes had just rolled out a major version, v0.23.0 (officially codenamed "The Hear

📜 Table of Contents

• Body
• What problems does this update solve?
• First surprise: the entire workbench works in the browser
• Second surprise: you can see images right in the terminal
• Third surprise: one gateway manages all sessions
• Fourth surprise: plugin ecosystem and wallet protection
• Upgrade notes: two pitfalls
• Did a big cleanup while I was at it: 19.3 GB to 13.1 GB
• Final thoughts

Hermes 0.23.0 Update Experience: The Entire Workbench Moves into the Browser, and I Trimmed 6GB Off It Along the Way

Body

Anyone who's been using AI Agents lately has probably felt the same thing: the more you use it, the more you can't live without it—but its "weight" on your hard drive has quietly spiraled out of control. In my case, it was a double whammy—last week Hermes just pushed a major release, v0.23.0 (officially codenamed "The Hearth Release"), packed with new features; this morning after upgrading, I checked its install directory and—good lord—19.3 GB. A "terminal assistant" that eats more than my video editing project folders.

This article covers two things: what's actually worth upgrading for in the Hearth Release, and how I slimmed Hermes from 19.3 GB down to 13.1 GB in half an hour—everything I deleted was backups, caches, and old-version corpses it had accumulated itself. Not a single feature was harmed.

What problems does this update solve?

The Hearth Release naming is pretty clever. The official release notes say: v0.22.0 was about getting newcomers through the door, v0.23.0 is about getting the hearth lit. In plain terms—the previous version solved "can you install it," this version solves "is it enjoyable to use."

First, the scale: roughly 10,080 commits, 1,950 merged PRs, 850 issues closed, 666 contributors, and it rolled in all seven patch releases from v0.22.1 through v0.22.7. That's a seriously aggressive pace for an open-source Agent project.

For a power user like me who treats Hermes as a productivity tool (I've been using it since version 0.15), there are four updates this time that I'll genuinely use every day.

First surprise: the entire workbench works in the browser

Previously, Hermes Desktop could only be installed on your computer—if you were out and about and wanted to check on an agent's progress, you needed remote desktop. The newly added Webapp moves the entire desktop workspace directly into a browser tab—the same chat, group chat, plugins, and settings, served by your own gateway. Any device on the LAN can open a browser and use it, and you can expose it to the public internet too, just add a login.

The feature is off by default—you need to enable Web Access in settings or configure webapp.enabled. I think defaulting to off is the right call—it's the "we give you the capability, you hold the key" approach.

Second surprise: you can see images right in the terminal

This update is a genuine necessity for someone like me doing video creation. Previously, when I asked the agent to take a screenshot or check a generated cover image, the terminal would just throw me a file path and I'd have to open the image myself. Now the CLI and TUI render images directly in the chat stream—kitty, Ghostty, iTerm2, WezTerm and other modern terminals get native true-pixel rendering, and unsupported terminals fall back to colored blocks.

It's even better paired with another new feature: press Esc twice or type /rewind to rewind to any message in the conversation, edit and resend, or fork a new session from that point while the original session stays intact. The workflow of tweaking prompts and adjusting images suddenly flows—not satisfied? Rewind, change a line, go again.

Third surprise: one gateway manages all sessions

This is an architectural-level change in the Hearth Release, worth covering on its own. Previously, the CLI, TUI, desktop app, editor, messaging bots, and scheduled tasks might each run their own agent instance, writing messages to the same session—resulting in occasional duplicate or lost messages, and what you saw in one window differing from another.

Now each machine has only one gateway that exclusively owns all sessions, and every other interface connects as a client. One session synced everywhere, one queue, one history. You can even edit a prompt directly on the desktop while it's still queued and not yet executed—it won't run twice.

By the way, Group Chat got an upgrade too: Bot Mode rooms let the main bot or automatic routing decide who responds, scheduled tasks can post directly into rooms, and each bot shows real-time status like "scout · terminal · 7s"—you can tell at a glance what it's doing.

Fourth surprise: plugin ecosystem and wallet protection

The plugin directory grew from about 600 to 1,050+, with a new Verified vendor self-certification tier added. Among the new official plugins, Meshy (text-to-3D) and ElevenLabs music/sound effects are the ones I'm installing first thing.

What hit home most for me is price transparency for paid tools: per-call MCP tools like 3D generation and media generation now show clear pricing in the approval dialog—the unit price for this call and the cumulative spend for this conversation—and will ask you first if you're approaching the limit. Even YOLO mode gets blocked. Anyone using agents to call paid APIs knows how thoughtful this feature is.

A few other things worth knowing: the default model switched to GLM-5.3 (same price, 1M context); GPT-6.1 Terra, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and Gemini 4 Argon are all integrated; built-in skills were trimmed from 58 to 44, with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel merged into a single microsoft-office.

Upgrade notes: two pitfalls

If you're also on an older version, check these two things before upgrading.

First, the old ten browser_* tools (browser_navigate, browser_click, etc.) have all been removed—browser automation now has only one entry point: browser_exec. If your own skills or prompts reference the old tool names, you'll need to update them manually.

Second, hermes mcp serve was renamed to hermes mcp-serve—clients that connect to it as an MCP server need to update their launch command. Nobody's going to change that for you automatically.

Did a big cleanup while I was at it: 19.3 GB to 13.1 GB

After upgrading, I naturally did an acceptance check, which surfaced a new problem: Hermes's install directory (on Windows, under AppData\Local\hermes) had ballooned to 19.3 GB. I did a layer-by-layer inventory and found the problem wasn't the program itself, but the stuff it had accumulated on its own.

You probably have the same culprits among these deletions:

• Old runtime recycle bins: two folders starting with .reclaim under the tools directory—old Node and Python runtimes replaced during upgrades, 903 MB total, pure corpses.
• Old runtimes superseded by new versions: node-26.7.0, uv-0.12.3, and the deprecated agent-browser—167 MB combined.
• Skills curator backups: five historical backups crammed into 1.09 GB. I kept the most recent one at 82 MB, deleted the four older ones, reclaiming 1 GB.
• uv package cache: the uv cache under the cache directory alone took 2.18 GB. It re-downloads automatically when needed after deletion—zero risk.
• Old database backups: two pre-upgrade state.db emergency backups (920 MB) and one state.db.bak from August (346 MB). I kept only the latest one generated by today's upgrade.
• Desktop build cache: 532 MB of desktop-inputs build input cache in the hermes-agent directory—it rebuilds automatically next time.
• Rotated logs and old config backups: a few dozen MB of small stuff, cleaned up along the way.

The whole process freed 6.2 GB, and after cleanup Hermes is running perfectly—version number, models, gateway status all fine. If you want to give your own AI Agent a checkup, the approach is threefold: look for directories named .reclaim, .bak, or old; check the size of cache directories; and keep only the most recent upgrade emergency backup.

Final thoughts

The overall impression this release gives me is that Hermes is moving from "a very capable command-line assistant" toward "a permanent hearth in the home"—accessible from the browser, images in the terminal, conversations you can rewind, bills for what you spend. And the fact that its size spiraled out of control also shows that any agent system you use more and more needs periodic decluttering—in this respect it's no different from our phones or editing drives.

How big is your Hermes directory now? Drop a number in the comments—if you're over 15 GB, I'd suggest going through the checklist above.

(Body text approximately 2,300 characters)