Animated Companions Arrive for AI Agent, Offering Cosmetic Charm
Nous Research has introduced animated pets to its Hermes Agent, a move the company explicitly states serves no practical purpose. Despite this disclaimer, the development has been underway for some time, even prior to its official integration.
These digital mascots are small sprites designed to reside within the user’s terminal or desktop application, mirroring the agent’s current activity through a series of animations. The pets feature six distinct states: idle when no tasks are active, running during tool execution, in a “review mode” while the model is processing, a wave to signify a successful turn completion, a celebratory jump animation for finishing a full plan, and a “failed” state for errors.
The sprites are sourced from Petdex, an open-source community gallery boasting over 3,200 options. A single installation command, hermes pets install boba --select, places the chosen pet into the user’s profile directory and activates it. The feature is disabled by default and remains dormant until actively sought out by the user, a design choice likely intended to avoid unnecessary distraction.
Users can switch between different pets by installing a new one and then using the command hermes pets select name.
The rendering capabilities extend across the command-line interface (CLI), text-based user interface (TUI), and the official desktop application launched by Nous Research earlier this month. In the terminal, Hermes renders the sprites with full fidelity on setups supporting graphics protocols such as kitty, Ghostty, or WezTerm. For systems lacking these protocols, the agent defaults to a truecolor Unicode half-block rendering, which, while technical in description, ensures the pet is still displayed, albeit with a slightly less sharp, low-resolution appearance.
This addition is framed as a way to make the often stark terminal environment more engaging and “human.”
The desktop version presents the mascot on a canvas. A shift-click interaction allows the pet to be detached into a transparent, always-on-top window that remains visible even when Hermes is minimized. In this detached state, the pet can display speech bubbles indicating its status—”working…”, “thinking…”, “your turn”—and a mail icon to signal task completion during the user’s absence. This feature is humorously compared to Microsoft’s Clippy, with the key distinction being that these pets are not designed to be helpful, thus precluding any potential disappointment.
Nous Research emphasizes that these pets have no impact on prompt caching, token usage, or the agent’s core functionality. They are purely cosmetic, residing in the configuration file under display.pet, and serve only to enhance the existing user experience without any side effects.
Hermes Agent, released by Nous Research in February 2026, has garnered significant attention, exceeding 180,000 GitHub stars and fostering a growing ecosystem of community-developed tools and integrations. The majority of the team’s releases focus on substantial features, including persistent memory, self-improving skill loops, multi-agent support, and messaging gateways for platforms like Telegram, Discord, and Slack. The animated pets were quietly integrated alongside these more significant updates, appearing in the “Media & Web” section of the feature documentation, positioned between Spotify integration and Voice & TTS capabilities. The Petdex gallery actively encourages community submissions, ensuring the current library of over 3,200 sprites will continue to expand.
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