The pets are small mascot sprites that sit in your terminal or desktop app and map their animations to whatever the agent is doing. Six states total: idle when nothing's happening, running when a tool executes, in review mode when the model is thinking, a wave when a turn ends cleanly, a jump animation to celebrate when a full plan finishes, and a failed state when something breaks.
If you want to change pets, simply install a new one and switch between pets by typing the command hermes pets select name
It’s perfect to spend time and make the boring terminal a bit more human.
The desktop version floats the mascot on a canvas. Shift-click it to pop it out into a transparent, always-on-top window that stays visible while Hermes is minimized. Out there the pet shows a speech bubble—"working…", "thinking…", "your turn"—and a mail icon when a task finishes while you're away. It's a Clippy revival, except nobody asked it to be helpful and it therefore cannot disappoint you.
Nous Research specifies clearly that pets have no effect on prompt caching, tokens, or the agent's behavior. They live in your config under display.pet and decorate whatever's already happening—purely cosmetic, zero side effects.
