# 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

```bash
# 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.

```bash
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.