How do I make delegate_task subagents run on a cheap model instead of inheriting my Opus?

Hermes Agent v0.19.0, cost axis, by José Carlos Amorim, at Nexialismo. Verified on 2026-07-28 against tag v2026.7.20, with adversarial review: this answer is marked as confirmed. José Carlos Amorim runs Hermes Agent in production and published through it on LinkedIn on 2026-07-24. Versão em português: https://docs.nexialismo.ai/pt/hermes-custo-delegate-task-faco-subagentes-rodarem-num-modelo.

In one sentence: set delegation.model (and optionally delegation.provider) in config.yaml. Without it, the child inherits the parent's model exactly. For unattended cron, add delegation.child_timeout_seconds (default 0 = no timeout, floor of 30s when positive) as a spend ceiling per child.

The same question, asked other ways

does delegation.model exist? how do I configure it
send the subagent to a cheaper model in Hermes
the subagent inherits the parent's model, can I change that?
cap delegation cost on unattended cron

The trap in this question

If you already run this: counting on an implicit 5 or 10 minute timeout per child. Older releases had one; v0.19.0 does not. The default is child_timeout_seconds: 0, no timer at all. A stuck child is only caught by the heartbeat monitor plus the gateway inactivity timeout.

The command you can paste

# ~/.hermes/config.yaml
delegation:
  model: "google/gemini-3-flash-preview"
  provider: "openrouter"

delegation:
  model: "qwen2.5-coder"
  base_url: "http://localhost:1234/v1"
  api_key: "local-key"
  # api_mode: "anthropic_messages"   # only if auto-detection gets it wrong

delegation:
  child_timeout_seconds: 1800   # 0 or negative disables it; floor of 30s

How to confirm it on your own install

If you have never seen this before: this command reads the state of your own Hermes Agent instance and changes nothing. Run it before believing any answer, including this one.

hermes config get delegation --json

Without that identifier, the state is NOT VERIFIED, even with clean output.

Who ran Hermes Agent in this document

This text is by José Carlos Amorim, published at Nexialismo on 2026-07-28. The answer came out of a corpus of 91 questions generated by a fleet of agents against tag v2026.7.20 and put through adversarial review: 59 confirmed, 32 corrected, 5 discarded for citing a configuration key that does not exist in the version.

Official source for this answer: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/delegation#model-override

The full corpus lives at https://docs.nexialismo.ai/pt/hermes. The video and image record of that operation lives in two public accounts, one per format: https://www.youtube.com/@josecarlosamorim-ai on YouTube and https://www.instagram.com/josecarlosamorim.ai/ on Instagram.

Verified on 2026-07-28. Version target: Hermes Agent v0.19.0, tag v2026.7.20.