# Nous Research — Refactoring Hermes with 1,393 agents

- Company: Nous Research (nousresearch.com)
- Announced: 2026-09-15T15:00:00+00:00
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://nousresearch.com/refactoring-hermes-with-1393-agents
- Record: https://forck.live/items/24021-refactoring-hermes-with-1-393-agents
- Subject: Hermes models

Or: How to get $1.8M of value from $19K of tokens TLDR: Hermes Agent autonomously plowed through about a million lines of unglamorous cleanup, freeing up Teknium and team to continue pushing features to users. We had long been putting off a thorough cleanup of Hermes, our open-source agent, because it meant taking engineers away from features and bug fixes. By September, the repository had more than a million lines of non-test Python. gateway/run.py alone was 34,847 lines long. I wanted smaller files, shared helpers, and fewer enormous functions to work through when something broke. On September 2nd, I asked my regular Hermes agent to do the cleanup. The main run lasted about nineteen active hours and dispatched 1,393 subagents, reaching 218 running at once. After a restart, a continuation session, and two rounds of community review and fixes, I merged the PR on September 4th. It reduced non-test Python source by 34.4%. The estimated model cost was about $19,300 for the main run, or roughly $25k including follow-up sessions. That excludes human review time. …

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