Nous Research has released an update to Hermes Agent that lets subagents run without freezing the parent chat. Previously, when you used the delegate tool to spawn child agents, the parent agent waited inside the tool call until every subagent finished. This blocked the chat interface, prevented you from sending new messages, and made it impossible to check progress or steer a long‑running task while it was still active.
The new asynchronous delegation feature solves these problems. By enabling the async_delegation toolset (issue #5586), you can start subagents in the background and receive a task identifier immediately. The parent chat stays responsive, allowing you to continue working, ask questions, or issue other commands while the subagents run.
To use the update, existing users simply run the Hermes update command. Once updated, you have access to a full lifecycle toolkit: delegate_task_async to launch a background agent and get a task_id, check_task to poll status without blocking, steer_task to inject guidance into a running subagent, collect_task to wait for completion and retrieve the final summary, cancel_task to stop a task early, and list_tasks to view all active subagents in the session.
All subagents still run with isolated conversations, terminals, and toolsets, and they return only a summary to the parent, keeping the context window lightweight. Credentials, API keys, and model configurations are inherited from the parent, so you can route subagents to cheaper models via your config.yaml if needed.
This change removes the bottleneck of synchronous delegation, lets you keep the chat fluid while agents work in parallel, and gives you real‑time control over long‑running fan‑out workloads without sacrificing the isolation and safety guarantees that Hermes Agent provides.
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