Hermes Agent Deep Cuts: Gateway Per-Platform Toolsets

Jul 16, 2026 4 min read

I am running Hermes Agent v0.18.0 (2026.7.1), and this post is part of the ongoing Deep Cuts series — spotlighting one specific feature that most users walk past.

Today’s topic is gateway per-platform toolsets: the ability to give your Hermes agent different tool capabilities depending on which platform you are talking to it from.

What Is Gateway Per-Platform Toolsets?

Hermes Agent has a multi-platform gateway — the same agent instance can simultaneously serve Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, the CLI, and a dozen other platforms. Most users who set up the gateway connect one or two platforms and call it done. What they miss: each platform can have its own toolset configuration.

This means:

Telegram — search the web, read files, delegate research tasks. No terminal access, no code execution, no file writes.
Discord — web search, read-only file access, skill management. No dangerous shell commands.
CLI — full toolset: terminal, code execution, browser, file writes, everything.
API Server — a curated subset for programmatic consumption.

Same agent. Same memory, same skills, same cron jobs. Different capabilities per surface.

Why It Is Obscure

Three reasons most users never configure this:

The gateway setup wizard is easy-mode — hermes gateway setup walks you through connecting platforms, but it does not prompt you to configure per-platform toolsets. It assumes the defaults are fine.
The tools UI hides per-platform toggles — hermes tools opens a curses interface that shows toolsets and their status, but the per-platform column is easy to miss unless you know to look for it.
There is no error when you skip it — the agent works fine everywhere with the default toolset. You never feel the gap until a production terminal command fires from a Telegram message and you think “wait, I did not want that running from my phone.”

How to Use It

The per-platform tool configuration lives in the hermes tools curses interface. Open it:

hermes tools

You will see a table like this (simplified):

Toolset         │ CLI │ Telegram │ Discord │ Slack
────────────────┼─────┼──────────┼─────────┼──────
web             │  ✔  │    ✔     │    ✔    │  ✔
terminal        │  ✔  │    ✘     │    ✘    │  ✘
file            │  ✔  │    ✔     │    ✔    │  ✔
code_execution  │  ✔  │    ✘     │    ✘    │  ✘
browser         │  ✔  │    ✘     │    ✘    │  ✘
vision          │  ✔  │    ✔     │    ✔    │  ✔
image_gen       │  ✔  │    ✔     │    ✔    │  ✔
skills          │  ✔  │    ✔     │    ✔    │  ✔
delegation      │  ✔  │    ✔     │    ✔    │  ✔
cronjob         │  ✔  │    ✘     │    ✘    │  ✘

Toggle with space or enter. The changes take effect on the next /reset or gateway restart.

You can also control this from ~/.hermes/config.yaml if you prefer text over curses:

toolsets:
  terminal:
    platforms:
      cli: true
      telegram: false
      discord: false
      slack: false
  code_execution:
    platforms:
      cli: true
      telegram: false
  browser:
    platforms:
      cli: true
      telegram: false

The per-platform overrides merge with the global toolset enable/disable — if a toolset is globally disabled, no platform can use it.

Additionally, skills can be gated per platform:

hermes skills config

This opens a similar interface showing which skills are loaded on which platform. A skill about system administration might be CLI-only, while a note-taking skill is available everywhere.

A Practical Scenario

You run Hermes on a VPS with the gateway serving Telegram (your mobile interface) and the CLI (your workstation interface). Every morning, you:

On Telegram (mobile, walking to coffee):

/skills find fetch-api — search for a skill
What is the status of the production deploy? — web search for status
Summarize the latest PR reviews — delegation to research
No terminal commands execute from here. The model cannot accidentally docker rm -f $(docker ps -aq) from your phone.

On the CLI (workstation, at desk):

Full terminal access for debugging
code_execution for analyzing data
Browser automation for testing UI
Cron management

The same session, the same agent, the same memory. But the risk profile is wildly different per surface. The Telegram side is effectively read-only for infrastructure operations. The CLI side has the keys to everything.

This is not a theoretical scenario — it is the exact configuration that prevents an accidental rm -rf /var/lib/docker from an mistyped Telegram command. The gateway integration test suite at Hermes includes a regression test for exactly this case: verifying that terminal tool calls are rejected on Telegram while web_search passes through.

A Gotcha

Platform toggles take effect on session reset, not instantly. If you disable terminal for Telegram at 10:00, any currently running Telegram session continues with the old toolset until it resets (/new or /reset). This is because Hermes snapshots the toolset at session creation to preserve prompt caching — changing tools mid-session would invalidate the cached system prompt.

The same applies to hermes skills config changes. Always run /reset on the target platform after changing toolsets or skill visibility.

Another subtlety: the default toolset for new platforms is “inherit from CLI”. If you add a new platform (say, Matrix) and have not explicitly configured its tools, it inherits the CLI toolset — which may include terminal and code execution. Always explicitly configure a new platform’s tools before connecting it to untrusted surfaces. The safest pattern is to create a “gateway” profile with restricted tools and point all messaging platforms at it.

Closing

Per-platform toolsets turn a single Hermes instance into a multi-surface agent that respects the security posture of each interface. Your phone should not be able to run docker kill commands. Your CLI should be able to do everything. The gateway makes this distinction possible — but only if you configure it.

For the full gateway platform documentation, including the complete list of supported platforms and per-platform configuration options:

https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/messaging/