Hermes Discord Rich Presence

Discord can show a short line under your name about what you are doing. I wanted it to show my Hermes agent at work: which model, roughly how many tokens, whether it was thinking or running a tool, and for how long.

But that line is public to everyone in your servers, and a session title alone can give away what you are working on. So the question was never just how to put text in Discord. It was how to show an AI agent's activity without revealing more than the person using it meant to.

I started with my own implementation. It never became a product. Its value was that it made me solve the hard parts myself, which later let me judge someone else's version on evidence rather than taste.

Then I found that Hermes already had an established community plugin for exactly this, maintained by DarRahman (opens in a new tab).

A second, near-identical plugin splits users and effort. So I stopped treating my version as something to ship and started using it as a measuring stick.

Comparing the two surfaced a list of suspicions. A difference from my design is not automatically a bug, so I tried to reproduce each one — and treated a suspicion that failed to reproduce as a result worth keeping, not an embarrassment to hide.

The plugin had two privacy settings, and both looked like they worked: turn one on, and the activity disappeared from the main lines. But Discord shows more than those lines. The plugin still wrote the activity — say, “Running Terminal Command” — into the tooltip you see when you hover the app icon. Pick a setting below to see it.

A two-line fix is easy to write and easy to get subtly wrong. Before sending it, I made the bug fail a test, made the test pass, and then checked that nothing else moved.

Fixing the tooltip closed a leak, but it left a bigger question. The plugin could already hide the session title — it just didn't, unless you went looking for the setting. Out of the box, it published the one thing most likely to say what you were working on.

So I opened an issue rather than a patch: a question about defaults is the maintainer's to decide. I proposed that new installs show a generic “Active Session” instead, and that model, tokens and tool state stay visible, because they are what make the status useful. The maintainer agreed, went further than I asked — an unset value now falls back to generic too — and shipped it.

Installing the plugin on my Mac, Hermes refused it with a dependency conflict. The surprise was the cause: even on macOS, the installer checks every platform the dependencies might ever run on, including Android. On that path, Hermes and the plugin disagreed about one library.

I reproduced it and found a workaround. But before opening a pull request, I checked upstream — and the maintainer had already fixed it, more cleanly, by removing the plugin's redundant requirement. So the right contribution was no contribution.

Separately from the plugin, building my own version exposed a rule Hermes did not always keep. Plugins are told when an AI turn starts, and expect to be told when it ends. On a few unusual exit paths — an early return, an error, an interruption — the end was never announced.

Discord presence mostly recovers on its own, because it refreshes periodically. The observers that really need a balanced start and end are others — cleanup and metrics — which is why I proposed this as a general fix to Hermes rather than a Discord workaround.

Five items on GitHub are part of this story. Three are mine: a merged fix, an adopted proposal and an open pull request. Two are the maintainer's, and are labelled that way.

I use coding agents heavily — Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex. I treat what they produce as a hypothesis until the behaviour is reproduced. That mattered here: some early concerns held up and others did not, and the contribution came from that verification loop, not from accepting generated code at face value.

My part was the judgment around the code: defining what the behaviour should be, directing the investigation, challenging claims that had not been shown, deciding what was worth sending upstream — and whether it should be a patch or a question — and reviewing every diff and test before it left my machine.