Hermes Agent now deletes old chats after 90 days: how to keep yours

Hermes Agent, the open source AI agent built by Nous Research, now deletes finished conversations that have been idle for 90 days. The change arrived with version 0.22, which Nous Research published on GitHub on the 14th of October 2026 under the name "The Threshold Release", according to the official release notes. The clean-up runs when Hermes Agent starts. Pinned conversations and conversations still in progress are left in place, and one setting switches the whole feature off.

For an owner, this means a chat from the summer that has been closed and untouched since then can disappear after the update. A chat marked as important, or one that is still running, stays.

What changed on the 14th of October

Hermes Agent stores every conversation as a "session", one saved chat with everything said in it. According to the release notes, the session clean-up setting, called auto prune, is now switched on by default. Before this release it had to be turned on by hand.

The rule has three parts, as the release notes describe it:

• the session has ended, meaning the conversation is finished;
• it has had no activity for 90 days;
• Hermes Agent is starting up, which is the moment the clean-up runs.

The Hermes Agent documentation on sessions adds that the sweep runs at most once a day, even when the agent restarts more often. It also says the 90 days are a default: the setting called retention days, a whole number of days, sets a longer or a shorter window.

Two patch releases followed, version 0.22.1 and version 0.22.2, by the 15th of October, according to the project's release page on GitHub.

Why Nous Research made the change

The release notes give the reason in one line: the state database stops growing. The state database is the single file on the machine where Hermes Agent keeps its conversations.

The same clean-up pass also closes old helper sessions that were left open, according to the release notes. These are the sessions created by scheduled jobs, by the kanban task board and by subagents, the helper agents Hermes Agent starts for smaller pieces of work. The documentation says closing them keeps them resumable, and they become eligible for deletion only after a further full 90 days.

Finally, the file is compacted only when at least a quarter of its space can be won back. Compacting means rewriting the file without the empty gaps left by deleted chats, so it takes less room on the disk.

On the 15th of October the account Hermes Agent Tips on X flagged the change to its readers. The post had 8,633 views at the time of reading.

How to keep your chats

The documentation describes three ways to keep conversations that matter. Each one works on its own, and they can be combined.

• Pin the chats that matter. Pinning puts a lasting "keep" mark on a conversation, and pinned sessions are protected from the clean-up. In Hermes Desktop, the desktop app, the sidebar has a Pinned section for this. The command line has a pin command for the same mark, and the documentation says both places share it, so a chat pinned in one shows as pinned in the other.
• Keep a copy outside the agent. The documentation describes an export of sessions to a file on the computer. The formats include a backup file that Hermes Agent can read back, plain text files that read like a document, and a single web page that opens in any browser. An option removes passwords and keys from the copy before it is shared. The documentation lists the export as the step to take before any manual clean-up.
• Switch the clean-up off. The session clean-up setting, called auto prune, lives in the Hermes Agent configuration file, the settings file inside the Hermes folder in the user's home directory. Setting it to false keeps every finished chat, which is how Hermes Agent behaved before version 0.22. The documentation calls this setting the switch for anyone who wants to keep all history.

The release notes also mention a separate backup tool for the whole agent, which now keeps the newest three backups and flags any that were saved only in part.

The rest of the release, in one line

Version 0.22 also lets a new user start without connecting a model provider first, adds connectors to everyday work apps and opens a catalogue of 600 reviewed plugins, according to the same release notes.

An agent on a server that stays on

The clean-up runs when Hermes Agent or one of its scheduled jobs starts, at most once a day, according to the documentation. Pinning and exports work the same way on a laptop and on a server.

OneClickClaw hosts Hermes Agent on its own server that stays on day and night. Plans start at the Starter tier, EUR 14.99 per month, with a 7-day free trial.