Hermes drafts passive group-history copies without coordinator takeover

Hermes' Group Chat work has reached a new, narrower milestone: copying conversation history to participants without making those participants replacement coordinators. The September 6 draft extends passive storage and authenticated RoomLink delivery toward host-offline continuity. Its explicit limit is the story. Having a readable replica does not establish that a disconnected gateway may schedule work, honor approvals or continue the same conversation independently.

The facts

- History replication is an explicit invitation option; existing grants do not silently receive the new permission. - Delivery binds the group, home, epoch, member, installation and profile, with signature and revocation checks revalidated when history is persisted. - Background publishing belongs to the gateway rather than a Bot turn or Desktop process, with durable recovery after lost acknowledgments. - The draft does not enable groups.promote or groups.demote and does not promise preservation of an unreplicated source tail. - The author reports 300 focused tests on one macOS revision and 62 selected native Windows tests on their specified revision, not one combined platform acceptance result. - Terminal disband remains a gate because ordinary route retirement can occur before the final history page reaches a participant.

Why it matters

Desktop independence and authority-host survival are often described as if they were the same feature. They are different failure domains. A gateway can keep working after a viewer closes while still remaining a single scheduling authority that must be reachable. The broader tracking issue distinguishes already-landed execution foundations from separately reviewed Desktop, Files and messaging layers. This new replication draft adds retention, but safe succession still needs an exclusive authority decision plus the recovery state for accepted work, Stop and revocations.

Current

Inspected on 2026-09-07. The Hermes Agent stable-release baseline is v2026.8.31 published 2026-08-31T19:29:49Z. The main source was open when captured. Release metadata is a version boundary, not evidence that an open proposal has shipped.

Evidence

The primary source is NousResearch/hermes-agent PR #104601 (https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/104601). Supporting context comes from NousResearch/hermes-agent issue #97681 (https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/97681); NousResearch/hermes-agent PR #99107 (https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/99107). The linked records were inspected directly; related project records are not independent confirmations.

Operator take

For evaluation, test history durability and authority separately. A lost acknowledgment should not duplicate retained history; a disconnected participant should not infer permission to take over; a disband should leave a terminal record rather than a misleading active copy. The supporting safety proposal refuses caller-asserted takeover until an exclusive lease or quorum decision can prove one winner. That is a product constraint worth keeping visible, not a missing checkbox to work around. The draft's real HTTP crash tests retain the source database and recover publishing; they do not simulate a complete authority-host loss and should not be marketed as that stronger guarantee.

Caveat

This is an API-first draft with revision-scoped contributor evidence. Automatic Desktop opt-in, terminal-disband delivery and independently hosted field acceptance remain incomplete for the new increment. Earlier integration demonstrations must not be relabeled as successful testing of this latest replication head.