bot-cabinet-v2

Cabinet for Hermes

Install

Install in Hermes · Read the manual (on the web)

1. In Hermes Desktop, open Capabilities → Plugins, find Cabinet in the catalog and press Install. Or press
   Install in Hermes on botcabinet.com/hermes/manual, on the
   computer where Hermes Desktop is installed; it opens the same screen. GitHub doesn't open hermes:// links, so the
   button lives there; you can also paste hermes://plugin/install?catalog=bot-cabinet-v2 into your browser.
2. Open Cabinet in the sidebar. If it isn't there yet, quit Hermes Desktop fully and open it again.
3. If it says Cabinet isn't connected, open Capabilities, turn Cabinet on, and open the page again.

Prefer the terminal? On Windows open PowerShell, on a Mac or Linux open Terminal, and run
hermes plugins install Dgardenhire/hermes-cabinet --enable. Then quit Hermes Desktop fully and open it again.

Tell Cabinet the job you need done. It answers with the smallest setup that does it, shows which of your answers
led there, and then helps you act on it: add one of botcabinet.com's Bots as a Hermes bot, plan a new one, or set
up a crew of Bots that hand work to each other. Anything Cabinet makes can be removed again from My Bots, as long
as you haven't changed it.

Cabinet is the Hermes Desktop edition of Bot Cabinet. Version 0.3.11, MIT licensed.

What it does

Add: the exact profile, editable, before anything is made	A crew: every bot, the handoff order, and what Hermes can't do
My Bots: status, chat, Remove only for untouched bots	The Fit Test answer, traced to your answers

How Cabinet stays out of the Hermes Bots lane

Hermes is getting its own Bots catalog (NousResearch/hermes-agent#119260, not in Hermes main yet). A Bot that catalog
carries is added there. Cabinet works the same with or without it, and does these things when it is there:

• It asks Hermes. When the page opens, Cabinet asks this Hermes's gateway for bots.catalog. An answer means the
  catalog is there. An error or a timeout means it isn't, and Cabinet adds every Bot itself, as before. A yes is kept
  for half an hour, a no is asked again after a minute, and Refresh asks straight away. Cabinet's backend also reads
  the catalog from Hermes itself, so a Bot it carries is handed over even while the gateway is slow to answer.
• It hands over. For a Bot the catalog carries (the catalog name equals Cabinet's slug), Add reads "Add in Hermes
  Bots" and opens Capabilities, in the Bots tab, naming the Bot to pick there. The plugin SDK has no way to open a
  hermes://bot/install?catalog=<name> link, so the catalog's own review screen for that one Bot can't be opened
  directly. Cabinet makes no copy of its own, and its backend refuses to make one if asked directly.
• Crews follow the same rule. Cabinet never makes a crew member the Hermes catalog carries. You add that Bot in
  Hermes Bots first, and the crew uses it, under whatever profile name Hermes Bots gave it.
• It flags an earlier copy. If Cabinet made a Bot before your Hermes had its own catalog, My Bots says Hermes Bots
  also has it, so you keep one copy.
• It adds the rest. A Bot the catalog doesn't carry keeps Cabinet's own Add, through profiles.create.
• It never adds a second copy. A profile with a bot-blueprint.yaml, or whose profile.yaml says
  kind: bot-catalog, shows "Already added through Hermes Bots" in The Cabinet and in My Bots.
• It never takes one over. Cabinet never records, edits or removes a profile Hermes's catalog added, even one
  with the name Cabinet planned.

What stays Cabinet's: the Fit Test (do you need a Bot at all?), Bot Lab (a Bot nobody published), Crew Kits (several
Bots in a set order, with blocked Kanban cards) and Test Records (what has been tested). For talking a job through
with several bots at once, Cabinet points to Hermes's own group chats.

Install in Hermes Desktop

Cabinet needs Hermes 0.22.0 or later, and git (Hermes uses it to fetch the plugin).

1. Open Capabilities → Plugins in Hermes Desktop, find Cabinet and press Install, or press Install in
   Hermes on botcabinet.com/hermes/manual, which opens
   hermes://plugin/install?catalog=bot-cabinet-v2. Either way Hermes installs the commit Nous Research reviewed. The
   plugin installs under its registry name, bot-cabinet-v2.
2. Open Cabinet in the sidebar. If it isn't there yet, quit Hermes Desktop fully and open it again, or open
   Capabilities, Plugins and press Rescan. If the page says Cabinet isn't connected, turn the plugin on under
   Capabilities and reopen the page.

From a terminal instead: hermes plugins install Dgardenhire/hermes-cabinet --enable (PowerShell on Windows,
Terminal on a Mac or Linux), then restart Hermes Desktop. This installs the latest version from GitHub. If you run
Hermes without the Desktop app, run hermes gateway restart instead of restarting the app.

These steps were run on Oct 15, 2026 against a fresh copy of Hermes 0.22.1: the plugin installed from this repository,
switched itself on, loaded cleanly, and its desktop page and dashboard routes answered.

How adding works

1. Plan. Cabinet builds the profile from the Bot's catalog entry and your edits (installer.py) and checks every
   part (safety.py). Nothing is written.
2. Create. The page sends that exact request to Hermes's gateway, profiles.create, the call New Agent uses. Hermes
   gives the new bot your current model and sign-in. Cabinet passes no model and never handles a credential. The page
   waits up to two minutes, because Hermes sets up a new profile in a separate process.
3. Record. Cabinet checks what Hermes made (it exists, is new since the plan, carries the planned instructions,
   and Hermes's own Bots catalog didn't add it) and records a fingerprint: every file in the profile, by size and
   hash (the keys file by size and time only, never its contents). If the reply from Hermes was lost,
   Cabinet records the profile only when its instructions are exactly the planned ones, and changes nothing in it. If
   Hermes says the name already exists, Cabinet records nothing.

Remove works only while every file still matches that fingerprint, and goes through Hermes's own delete. A file
added, removed or changed anywhere in the profile keeps it, hidden files included. Only what Hermes writes by itself
as a bot runs doesn't count: caches, locks, logs, snapshots, backups, running state and downloaded tools and models
(the full list is in SECURITY.md). A chat in state.db or a project in projects.db does count. A bot recorded by
Cabinet 0.3.10 or older has no file list, so Cabinet keeps it and says why. A crew
member's instructions name its own step, who it gets work from and who it hands to next, from the crew's handoff
order. Hermes does not run a crew by itself, and Cabinet says so on the crew screen. Once a crew is set up, Cabinet
suggests a Hermes group chat with its bots for talking the job through; the crew's order stays with the Kanban cards.

Live catalog

On open and on Refresh, Cabinet asks https://botcabinet.com/catalog.json for the current catalog, checks it against a
strict schema (catalog_schema.py), and keeps the last good copy. botcabinet.com publishes it from every site build
(since October 15, 2026), so Cabinet shows "Updated from botcabinet.com"; if the site can't be reached it uses
the last good copy, or the catalog it shipped with, and says which. docs/site-catalog-contract.md
is the file's contract; tools/make_site_catalog.py writes it.

Privacy

• Cabinet makes one network request: the catalog file above, over https, to botcabinet.com only, at most 2 MB. No
  analytics, no telemetry, no account.
• Cabinet never reads, stores or passes on your sign-in, keys or model settings. Instructions that look like they hold a
  key or password are refused.
• Cabinet's own record (what it made, saved kits, the cached catalog) is a small SQLite file and a JSON file in
  $HERMES_HOME/state/bot-cabinet-v2/ (normally ~/.hermes/state/bot-cabinet-v2/). Delete that folder to forget everything Cabinet knows; your bots stay.
• A Fit Test answer's chat button, and Bot Lab's Ask Hermes to help, open a new chat and send that one message there. If the app has no composer to send through, the message goes to your clipboard instead. Cabinet sends nothing else.

What Cabinet does on your computer (disclosure)

Everything a careful user would want to know before installing, in one place. SECURITY.md has the detail and how to
check each line.

• Network. One https request, to https://botcabinet.com/catalog.json, when the page opens and on Refresh. At
  most 2 MB, same-host redirects only, checked against a strict schema before use. Nothing is sent but the request
  itself. No analytics, no telemetry, no account.
• Creates and removes Hermes profiles. Add and crew setup create profiles through Hermes's own gateway call
  profiles.create (the call New Agent uses). Remove deletes a profile through Hermes's own delete_profile, and only
  a profile Cabinet made whose files all still match the list Cabinet recorded. A profile you changed, or one Hermes's
  Bots catalog added, is never edited or removed.
• Kanban cards. Setting up a crew can add blocked cards to your Hermes Kanban board (optional, one per step), and
  removing the crew archives them.
• Reads outside its own folder. It lists ~/.hermes/profiles/ to avoid name clashes and to see which profiles it
  made, reads a profile's SOUL.md, profile.yaml and bot-blueprint.yaml to check what Hermes made, hashes its
  SOUL.md, config.yaml and skills folder to fingerprint it (the contents are not stored), and asks the gateway
  whether Hermes's own Bots catalog (bots.catalog) is present.
• Writes. Its own record (a small SQLite file and the cached catalog) in $HERMES_HOME/state/bot-cabinet-v2/ (normally ~/.hermes/state/bot-cabinet-v2/). In a
  profile it has just made: the display name, through Hermes's own profile metadata call, and, only if Hermes didn't
  save the planned instructions, that new profile's SOUL.md. Nothing else.
• No shell commands, no background processes, no credentials. Cabinet runs no subprocess, starts nothing that
  outlives the page, and never reads, stores or passes on a key, token or model setting. The new bot uses the model and
  sign-in you already have, set by Hermes.
• Chat buttons. A Fit Test answer's chat button and Bot Lab's Ask Hermes to help open a new chat and send that one
  message; if the app has no composer, the message goes to your clipboard instead.
• Private Hermes modules. Cabinet reads Hermes's profile list and Kanban board through hermes_cli.profiles,
  hermes_cli.kanban_db, hermes_cli.kanban_db_connect and hermes_cli.bot_catalog, because the plugin API has no
  public seam for them yet. It never patches or replaces anything in Hermes. hermes plugins validate reports these
  imports as warnings.
• No self-updating. Cabinet never fetches or replaces its own code. The catalog file it downloads is data (Bots and
  crews), never code.

Verified and not verified

Verified by 449 tests (all pass with Hermes importable; the 3 that compare against a local botcabinet.com checkout skip without one):

• Cabinet's request goes through Hermes's real profiles.create handler, and Hermes's own SOUL.md loader loads exactly
  the planned instructions, with nothing flagged by its injection scanner. Run for every Bot and every crew with
  CABINET_E2E_ALL=1 python3 tests/run_with_hermes.py -k e2e.
• Crews: right members, handoff-aware instructions, Kanban cards blocked, chained and assigned to the right bot.
• Cabinet never overwrites, edits or deletes a profile it didn't make, or one you changed.
• The test runner fails if the real ~/.hermes changes.

Verified on Oct 15, 2026: the install steps, run against a fresh copy of Hermes 0.22.1; adding and removing a Bot
clicked through in a real Hermes Desktop, with the person's other profiles unchanged; the live catalog from
botcabinet.com. Verified on Oct 16, 2026: hand-over against the real Hermes Bots catalog code in NousResearch/hermes-agent#130283
(which includes #119260), in a clean copy of Hermes, for the four Bots both catalogs carry (Daily Newspaper, Receipt,
Coach, Professor): single adds, crews, and a Hermes update that brings the catalog in later. Not verified: no model
was called.

Develop

cd tests && python3 -m unittest discover -p "test_*.py"
python3 tests/run_with_hermes.py        # also the tests that call Hermes (separate clone, temporary home)
python3 harness/serve.py 8893           # then open http://127.0.0.1:8893/harness/
python3 harness/shoot.py                # screenshots of every screen into harness/shots/ (needs Google Chrome)

python3 works on macOS and Linux. On Windows, use py instead (py tests\run_with_hermes.py).

tests/run_with_hermes.py uses a separate clone of Hermes, named by CABINET_HERMES_SRC=/path/to/hermes-agent-clone,
and never the installed copy. Without it, the tests that need Hermes are skipped.

Credits

See CREDITS.md. In short: Bot Cabinet and its Bots come from botcabinet.com; Daily Newspaper was inspired by Karen X.
Cheng's The Morning Newspaper; the Hermes Bible guides belong to their authors.

README from the reviewed commit d6a816c; it updates when the author re-pins.