Hermes Agent Architecture

The canonical multi-agent tutorial shows an orchestrator spawning subagents, collecting results, and synthesizing a response. This works in demos. It fails in production when any of the following occur: a subagent hangs, the orchestrator crashes mid-execution, a tool call fails after partial side effects, the user needs to pause a multi-hour job, or the system needs to retry a failed step without re-doing completed work.

Durable execution is the solution to all of these problems. Temporal, Inngest, Cloudflare Workflows, and the Vercel Workflows system implement durable execution: the ability to run long-running workflows that survive process crashes, resume after failures, and checkpoint progress so completed work is never repeated.

The Hermes architecture is Tenten AI's production multi-agent pattern built on durable execution principles. This whitepaper describes the architecture, the design decisions behind it, and the specific failure modes it addresses.