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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.

Quantum Computing Claims Under Scrutiny as Researcher Challenges Microsoft’s Breakthrough

Weeks after Microsoft unveiled its Majorana 2 quantum chip, touting it as a significant leap forward with 1,000 times the reliability of its predecessor and a crucial step toward practical quantum computing by 2029, a prominent researcher has cast doubt on the company’s assertions.

In a commentary published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Henry Legg, a physicist at the University of St Andrews, argued that Microsoft has failed to provide definitive proof of a topological qubit, a theoretical type of quantum bit designed to be more resilient to errors than conventional quantum computing methods.

“My critique exposing flawed tune-up procedures, code errors, and omitted data behind Microsoft’s ‘breakthrough’ quantum computing claims is published today in Nature,” Legg stated on the social platform BlueSky. “In short: Microsoft haven’t demonstrated the basic physics needed for even a single topological qubit.”

Legg’s commentary directly addresses a 2025 paper published in Nature by Microsoft Quantum researchers, which detailed evidence for the company’s topological qubit. According to Legg, the signals Microsoft attributes to this device could instead be the result of experimental noise.

“The detection of a topographical superconducting phase–the basis of proposed topological qubits–is notoriously difficult because trivial states can mimic the signatures expected from a topological superconductor,” Legg explained.

Microsoft had previously stated that Majorana 2 can maintain quantum information stability for an average of 20 seconds, with some qubits lasting up to a minute. The company credited artificial intelligence with accelerating development by identifying promising materials, automating testing, and enhancing manufacturing processes. The chip’s functionality hinges on the same topological qubit technology now facing criticism. Microsoft maintains that this approach could lead to more dependable quantum computers by mitigating the errors that currently plague existing systems.

Legg contended that previously unpublished transport data underpinning Microsoft’s findings did not clearly demonstrate the superconducting state necessary to support the company’s topological qubit claim. Instead, he suggested that the measurements appeared more consistent with alternative explanations, such as quantum dot effects.

Microsoft has pushed back against Legg’s conclusions.

“We stand by our results and our roadmap,” Chetan Nayak, Microsoft’s Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President for Quantum Hardware, told Scientific American. Nayak highlighted Microsoft’s progression into the final phase of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which he noted followed an independent evaluation of both public and proprietary results. “Skepticism and rigor are hallmarks of the scientific process, which we appreciate and have supported from various academics,” he added.

In a formal response also published in Nature on Wednesday, Microsoft argued that its measurements support the conclusion that it has successfully produced a topological qubit. The company asserted that the stable signals observed in its experiments are consistent with a topological state and would be unlikely to arise from mere noise or a gapless state, as Legg proposed.

This debate emerges as the cryptocurrency industry actively prepares for “Q-Day,” the anticipated point at which quantum computers will possess the power to break widely used public-key cryptography. Bitcoin is considered particularly vulnerable, as a quantum attacker could potentially derive private keys from exposed public keys, leading to the theft of funds. While Legg’s critique does not negate the possibility of this future threat, it does challenge the evidence Microsoft has presented in its pursuit of achieving it.