Hermes Kanban needs another reliability pass before teams treat workers like dependable teammates
Hermes v0.13.0 made Kanban the headline durable multi-agent layer, but fresh issue #24699 reports the exact handoff problem operators worry about: when a Kanban task is suspended and later resumed after more information arrives, the worker can lose prior task context and start over; when it needs the main agent or user, the subagent can repeatedly time out and retry while waiting. PR #24693 adds a related fix for worker setup: hermes profile create previously bootstrapped new profiles with only hermes-cli, so Kanban workers assigned to those profiles had no web, browser, terminal, or file toolsets and could silently degrade. The same new reliability cluster includes issue #24701, where /new can stall at destructive confirmation and repeat a prior task, issue #24698, where the latest Docker image lacks python-telegram-bot for Telegram gateway startup, and issue/PR #24697/#24700, where auxiliary vision analysis ignores SOUL.md and loses the session-specific lens.
The interesting part is not that Kanban exists; it is whether a worker can pause, ask, resume, and still remember the job. That is the difference between a demo board and a dependable execution layer. Missing toolsets, stale CLI state, missing Docker dependencies, and persona-blind vision descriptions all point to the same maturity gap: durable agents need the boring setup and handoff paths to be as reliable as the model call.
- Issue #24699 reports suspended Kanban tasks losing prior context on re-execution and subagents repeatedly timing out while waiting for user or main-agent input
- PR #24693 says fresh hermes profile create profiles defaulted to only hermes-cli, leaving Kanban workers without web, browser, terminal, or file access unless cloned or manually configured
- Issue #24701 reports /new stalling at destructive-command confirmation and then repeating prior task execution in an interactive CLI session
- Issue #24698 shows the latest v0.13.0 Docker image starting the gateway with “python-telegram-bot not installed” and no Telegram adapter
- Issue #24697 and PR #24700 document auxiliary vision calls that omit SOUL.md, so image descriptions lose the configured persona or expert lens
- Most evidence is issue/PR level and may change before a tagged Hermes release
- The Kanban report is from v0.12.0 while the surrounding reliability cluster includes v0.13.0, so operators should test their exact version
- Adding toolsets to profiles improves capability, but also broadens what a worker can do; pair it with approvals and scoped credentials