What is the real difference between delegate_task and Kanban? When do I use each one?

Hermes Agent v0.19.0, multi-agent 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 corrected. 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-multiagente-delegate-task-diferenca-kanban-uso-cada.

In one sentence: delegate_task is a function call (isolated context, anonymous child, no resumption). Kanban is a durable queue in SQLite (~/.hermes/kanban.db) where the child is a named profile with persistent memory, the parent is fire-and-forget, and a failure becomes block/unblock/re-run. Use delegate_task when the parent needs a short reasoning answer back in its own context; use Kanban when the work crosses an agent boundary, has to survive a restart, or might need a human.

The same question, asked other ways

• delegate_task or kanban, which one for my pipeline?
• kanban vs subagent in Hermes, what is the practical difference?
• when does delegate_task stop being enough and I need kanban?
• can I use both together in Hermes?

What breaks in Hermes Agent

If you use delegate_task for long work and the Hermes process restarts, the child is not resumed: the attempt becomes unknown, because Hermes cannot prove which side effects already happened. If you use Kanban with no gateway running, ready tasks just sit there, and hermes kanban create warns you about exactly that at creation time.

The trap in this question

If you already run this: treating Kanban as "delegate_task, improved". It is not. The parent does NOT block and the result does NOT come back into its context. After kanban_create the parent has already moved on. If you were expecting an inline return, the right primitive was delegate_task.

The command you can paste

# Kanban needs the gateway up (the dispatcher runs inside it)
hermes kanban init
hermes gateway start
hermes kanban create "research the funding landscape" --assignee researcher
hermes kanban watch

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 kanban diagnostics --json && hermes kanban stats --json

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

What the fleet corrected in this answer

delegate_task is a function call with isolated context and an anonymous child, with no resumption: failed is failed. In v0.19.0 the top-level call runs in the BACKGROUND by default. Hermes hands back a handle immediately and the result re-enters the conversation later, as a new message (delegation.md). What actually blocks is the orchestrator subagent, which waits on its own workers within the current turn in order to synthesize. Kanban is a durable queue in SQLite (~/.hermes/kanban.db), the child is a named profile with persistent memory, the parent is fire-and-forget after the create, and failure becomes block/unblock/re-run. The rule from the docs, literally: use delegate_task when the parent needs a short reasoning answer back in its own context, with no human in the loop; use Kanban when the work crosses an agent boundary, needs to survive a restart, might need a human, or needs to be discoverable later. Stateless request/response endpoints fall back to synchronous execution when they cannot deliver a detached result.

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/kanban

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.