Why is Hermes Agent smart routing not triggering?

Hermes Agent turned on smart model routing but it didn't trigger, usually not because the function was broken, but because the routing rules were originally very conservative. The official Providers documentation states that it will only send short, single-line, lightweight questions to cheaper models; As long as it looks like code, debugging, tool calls, multi-line analysis, it will continue to go to the master model.

Check the configuration first

1. Confirm smart_model_routing.enabled=true.
2. Verify that cheap_model.provider and cheap_model.model are calling normally.
3. See if your problem is more than max_simple_chars or max_simple_words.

Why it shouldn't be too aggressive

If a cheap model misconnects a complex task, the tool call fails, and the context understanding is poor, making it more expensive. Therefore, Hermes Agent chose "I'd rather trigger less than trigger randomly".

In a word: smart routing does not trigger, most likely because your problem is judged to be a complex task, not that the configuration must be wrong.

Official open source address: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent; Official document entry: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/.