Profiles, Actors & Delegation

This is the heart of the atlas. A profile is an isolated, long-lived instance with its own config, .env, SOUL.md, memory, sessions, skills, and cron. A subagent is ephemeral — spun up inside a profile to do parallel work and then gone. The architecture decision is not nine isolated profiles; it's a handful of persistent profiles that delegate heavy work to subagents.

The criterion: something deserves to be a profile when it needs durable identity, its own memory, a gateway, or its own cron. If it's just a repeatable procedure, it's a skill + delegation inside an existing profile. Default to fewer profiles and more delegation.

Planned notes

Profile = isolated long-lived instance: what state it owns
Subagent = ephemeral worker: lifecycle and parallelism
The criterion: when something earns a profile vs a skill + delegation
Few persistent profiles + delegation (not nine isolated profiles)
Orchestrator vs specialist profiles
Candidate actors as roles: orchestrator, researcher, job-hunter, inbox-assistant, atlas-curator, dev-agent
Delegation patterns: fan-out, sequential, supervised
When NOT to delegate (cost, latency, loss of context)
Accountability between actors: who owns the result
Profile distributions: packaging and sharing a profile
Mapping the candidate roles to a minimal set of real profiles

Core sources

Hermes — User Guide: Profiles — https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/profiles
Hermes — Profile Distributions — https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/profile-distributions
Hermes — Features overview (subagents / delegation) — https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/
Agentic Systems — multi-agent orchestration — TODO (see SOURCES.md).

Connects to: Native Orchestration · Identity & Context · Skills & Procedural Memory · Agent Security & Ops