Two open-source projects are fighting for the same job — “make my AI agents work together instead of in parallel silos” — but they come at it from opposite poles. hcom is a peer-to-peer messaging bus: a chatroom where every agent is an equal. ORCH is a hierarchical orchestration engine: a company where every agent has a role, a manager, and a mandatory review gate. Same problem, opposite philosophies.
Full disclosure up front: I’ve contributed to hcom’s ACP integration (so Hermes can join the bus), so I’m not neutral on that one. All numbers below were fetched from GitHub at publish time.
The Agent Client Protocol (ACP) is a JSON-RPC standard that lets different AI coding agents talk to each other. Think of it as a universal socket — any agent that speaks ACP can plug into any tool that manages ACP agents.
Hermes Agent ships an ACP adapter (hermes acp), version 0.19.0. That’s the plumbing. The interesting part is what you can plug it into.
hcom is a cross-agent messaging layer (SQLite-based). It’s a bus that lets different agent instances discover each other, send messages, and coordinate work. Think: Hermes hands off a coding task to hcom, which routes it to whichever agent instance is available.
