Session Resumption

19.3. Session Resumption — Picking Up Exactly Where You Left Off

Two ways to resume an old session on the CLI

hermes --continue             # continue the most recent CLI session (-c)
hermes --resume <session_id>  # resume a specific session by ID (-r)

Before continuing, Hermes shows you a recap so you can re-orient yourself before going further — no need to scroll through the entire long history to remember what was left unfinished.

The storage mechanism underneath

All session history is stored in SQLite at ~/.hermes/state.db, using WAL mode plus a dedicated retry layer to handle concurrent writes from multiple processes — guaranteeing the data does not get corrupted even when several interfaces (CLI, gateway) write at the same time.

Continuous across platforms

The “cross-platform conversation continuity” feature means a session that started on your phone (via Telegram) can be continued from the CLI or the desktop app — they are not separate threads.

Notes

• For important work sessions that you need to resume precisely, use --resume <session_id> instead of just --continue — this avoids accidentally jumping into a different recent session if you have several conversations running in parallel.
• When a conversation gets very long, Hermes compresses it mid-way (keeping the first 3 and last 20 turns, summarizing the middle) — this is why the recap sometimes does not “remember” details from very early in the session, and it is not a bug.