Disabling Approvals in Hermes | Generated by AI

Home 2026.05

Here’s what I found:

Three ways to skip approvals, from easiest to most permanent:

  1. /yolo slash command (easiest, per-session) Just type /yolo inside a hermes session. Toggles YOLO mode on/off. All dangerous commands auto-approved for that session. Does NOT persist to config — resets when you restart hermes.

  2. HERMES_YOLO_MODE=1 env var (per-process, no config edit) 
    HERMES_YOLO_MODE=1 hermes

    Frozen at module import time (line 29 of tools/approval.py) — can’t be flipped mid-session even by prompt injection. Good for “always skip in this shell”.

  3. Edit ~/.hermes/config.yaml (permanent, all sessions) 
    approvals:
  mode: off

    The code at tools/approval.py:825-837 handles YAML 1.1’s quirk where bare off is parsed as boolean False — it normalizes that to the string "off" correctly, so both mode: off and mode: "off" work.

Do you need to manually edit config.yaml? No. The /yolo command is the fastest way — one keystroke in-session. But it’s per-session only. If you want it permanent without editing the file, you’d need to use the env var approach or add export HERMES_YOLO_MODE=1 to your shell profile.

There’s no hermes config set approvals.mode off CLI subcommand exposed — the /config command is read-only (shows current config). The save_config_value() function exists internally and is used by commands like /reasoning, but no slash command wraps it for arbitrary config keys. That would actually be a nice addition — a generic /config set <key> <value> command.

My recommendation: Just type /yolo at the start of each session. It’s one command, zero config changes, and the status bar shows ⚠ YOLO so you know it’s active.

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