The Hermes Orchestrator is the subagent role in 📝Hermes Agent that keeps the delegation tool, letting a child agent spawn and coordinate its own workers when nested delegation is enabled.
Hermes delegation is flat by default: a parent at depth 0 spawns children at depth 1, and those children cannot delegate further. Each 📝subagent takes one of two roles. A leaf, the default, cannot call delegate_task; an orchestrator retains it and can split its assignment among workers of its own. Both roles remain blocked from clarify, memory, send_message and cronjob.
Nesting is governed by delegation.max_spawn_depth, which defaults to 1, so the orchestrator role is a no-op at default settings. Raising it to 2 lets orchestrator children spawn leaf grandchildren, and 3 or more allows deeper trees. The docs set no upper ceiling and name cost as the practical limit. Setting delegation.orchestrator_enabled to false is a global kill switch that forces every child to the leaf role.
Top-level delegations run in the background and post their results back later, but an orchestrator subagent waits for its own workers so it can synthesize their results before returning. The docs warn that each extra level multiplies spend: with max_spawn_depth at 3 and max_concurrent_children at 3, a tree can reach 27 concurrent leaf agents. The broader design of a lead agent that delegates subtasks and combines the results is covered in 📝Orchestrator-Worker.