How do I give a subagent a tool the parent does not have? Do I pass toolsets in delegate_task?

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 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-multiagente-delegate-task-faco-pro-subagente-ter-tool-agente-pai.

In one sentence: you cannot, and that is deliberate. delegate_task does not accept a model-facing toolsets parameter: every subagent inherits the toolsets enabled on the parent, so the model cannot hand a child powers the parent does not have. Configure the parent's tools before starting the conversation.

The same question, asked other ways

does delegate_task accept a toolsets parameter?
how do I give extra tools to a subagent in Hermes?
my subagent has no browser even though I asked for it
which toolsets does a subagent inherit from the parent?

The trap in this question

If you already run this: passing toolsets=[...] in delegate_task expecting to widen the child. The parameter does not exist. If you want variation per unit of work, use Kanban with per-card skills, or reconfigure the parent before the conversation starts.

The command you can paste

# enable it on the PARENT, before you start
hermes --toolsets hermes-cli,browser chat

hermes kanban create "audit auth" --assignee reviewer \
  --skill security-pr-audit --skill github-code-review

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 tools

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

What a leaf child cannot call

Inheritance is not the same as freedom. In v0.19.0, tools/delegate_tool.py keeps a DELEGATE_BLOCKED_TOOLS frozenset that blocks six tools for leaf children: delegate_task (no recursive delegation), clarify (no user interaction), memory (no writes to the shared MEMORY.md), send_message (no cross-platform side effects), execute_code (children should reason step by step, not write scripts) and cronjob (no scheduling more work in the parent's name). The official docs list four of the six, and execute_code is one of the missing ones: a pipeline where the child runs a Python script breaks silently. A child with role="orchestrator" gets back only delegate_task; the other five stay blocked.

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

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.