I still don't understand the point of these. I use AI basically 12 hours a day, and still haven't found a use case for it that isn't solved easily with existing tools, bash scripts, cron jobs, etc. Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw? I don't need to be able to call my AI agent on the phone... That's a gimmick.
My simple take: Hermes is for the less technical and is more polished. OpenClaw is deeper with more capabilities.
OpenClaw has come so far since its' original launch/craze. I recommend taking a second look if you haven't touched it in a while. If for no other reason than it's just a really fun playground with a LOT of areas to experiment in. Setup a myriad of agents with various models, skills, cron jobs, etc.
The control surfaces have come a long way as well.
Hermes is good fun, running that as well but feels like they focused on polish vs features in order to capitalize on the primitive state that OpenClaw was in for its first months.
People that got attracted to the hype of openclaw but couldn't endure the fast pace of breaking changes while they figured out the problem space were well served by going to Hermes.
About three weeks ago I was seduced by people singing praise to OpenClaw, and also by the fact that OpenClaw team burns millions of dollars of tokens per month on developing it — surely it must be good.
It turned out to be probably the crappiest, glitchiest piece of software I’ve used in the past few years. Its basic onboarding workflow was completely broken, GUI was a hallucinated mess.
Also it turned out that not a single person I know who dedicated time to configuring it, ever achieved anything remotely interesting as a result.
Everything you mentioned OpenClaw does is also something that Hermes supports. Hermes also supports project-scoped kanban boards and can orchestrate across multiple specialized Hermes profiles.
What are some examples of features that they have added since December that you use? I originally had setup openclaw back in Jan(?) and had it generating some news summaries for me and stuff. But ran out of ideas... would like to try it out again.
I tried to make mine as human-like as possible, with self-reflection, episodic memory / hippocampus, emotional tagging etc. If you prefer talking to a person, not a tool, you can take a look at https://lethe.gg/ (open source, written in Rust, hosted version available).
I've used Hermes Agent in a container, and it worked ok. Little rought around the edges, but that's to be expected.
But what I didn't understand... what benefit does it actually bring? On a default loadout, even after disabling tons of skills in the setup wizard, there were lots of useless garbage skills enabled, over 10k of context used just to list them all.
I vibe-coded my own harness that uses ACP so it supports any coding CLI that exposes ACP (copilot cli, opencode, basically every popular one with official or non-official wrappers). And I was able to achieve basically exactly what I wanted from any Claw-like agent, in like a few hours.
I know there's way, way more to these self-sufficient agents (compaction, memory system, etc) but in my mind, it feels like the closer you can be to a barebones "coding agent core" plus "gateways that point to it" the better.
I've done similar, even to the point of a discord gateway integration that is very similar to the one Hermes ships with.
I still use Hermes because it's not a problem I care about solving right now and am spending my time and tokens on more important problems. I don't plan to always use it, and if anything it gives me ideas for what the ideal shape of what I want would be.
Also to add, having a unified space to chat with an agent that has a local system it can work with is quite liberating because I use it to drive my agent orchestration system. So I'm no longer bound to my computer or any one providers harness and whatever mobile solution they provide if any. It's been quite freeing and I don't use Hermes that differently than I would chatgpt, except it know exactly how I like to do my work and that means I have to remind it less.
I did the same thing. I use the Pi coding agent and they support extensions. I asked GPT 5.5 to create a Pi extension that has the magic of Hermes and for me that was the long term memory and the cron/scheduling. And that way, I can use Pi as is and turn on these using a slash command.
there is no debacle, ". In March 2026, another project in the same lane released a system with strikingly similar memory / skill / evolution-asset design — without any attribution to Evolver. " there is nothing new about memory (aka sessions saved), skills (aka prompt in a file), etc folks have been doing this for 2+ years.
"Teknium" was also defending things on X like a Polymarket skill being pre-installed and stuff.
Seems like both projects are a bit unprofessional in terms of leaders. Hermes just tries to sound more authoritative with the "Nous Research" name and fancy site, etc.
Ya I can't take them seriously after reading through that, they sound like a bunch of clowns. There was no evidence of anything other than 'this company had similar features that we offered'
Boo fucking hoo. The desktop agent space converges on a small set of features that overlap. Grow the fuck up.
I just asked Antigravity to clone the repo to look to see if it might have leaky code and it flat out refused three times in a row to even clone it. It would seem the snake is eating its own head.
tl;dr for people who just read the inaccurate quote: It was the default search provider (for free), if you configured anything else, it was not used. They removed the default.
Did you read it? Given it's all AI slop I wouldn't be surprised if not, but the claim is basically "I had this idea first, I think they stole it from me."
Not that they stole code or even copy, just the idea from a completely open source project (at the time).
Given how many people have posted and released similar systems over the time skills came out and even before, that's a huge claim with no substance to back it.
I agree on the point of linking it, which the HN thread linked before supposedly had a link to the blog post in question but it did not have any content. So thanks for sharing nonetheless.
2. In the future, there won't be copyright. Or open source. Or anything "owned". It can all just be copied trivially, and there's literally no stopping it.
3. I don't know how to feel about any of that. This is so new and complicated. The whole world is changing dramatically and being completely reshaped.
As Musk and Dorsey have said, IP law is highly incompatible with AI.
Wasn't there some news a while ago that Anthropic and other frontier model companies used a bunch of pirated books to train their models? Are we not all benefiting from the fact that they also crawled a bunch of open code repos?
If something is open source, it's pretty easy to tell if code is pulled directly from another repo and included in a project. It's much harder to know if whatever model was building something pulled from it (through training or simply searching online).
> Wasn't there some news a while ago that Anthropic and other frontier model companies used a bunch of pirated books to train their models? Are we not all benefiting from the fact that they also crawled a bunch of open code repos?
Wow, I didn't know that. I was getting impressed by Hermes but yeah, I didn't know about it so thanks for telling me.
The behaviour by NousResearch is a bit bad (if I am understanding it correctly, I can be wrong, I usually am) but given its an open source project. I don't think that accredition makes a project bad and I simply don't understand the rationale behind a lot of it and streissand effect is starting to kick in the more they might be trying to hide it.
Why not just accredit EvoMap's Evolver or come up with an official statement or have a proper discussion between the two teams
> The behaviour by NousResearch is so bad given its an open source project. I don't think that accredition makes a project bad and I simply don't understand the rationale behind a lot of it and streissand effect is starting to kick in the more they might be trying to hide it.
> Why not just accredit EvoMap's Evolver or come up with an official statement or have a proper discussion between the two teams
Given that LLMs are capable of generating code from open source projects verbatim (and entire books like Harry Potter verbatim) and no one gives a damn it seems like copyright is essentially a dead letter, legally speaking at least And the courts (in the US and elsewhere) haven't decided to intervene at all. Still a scummy thing to do morally though, I agree.
What are you automating with OpenClaw in June, 2026?
I used OpenClaw -> Hermes -> my own thing now.
I've got things like code review, email inbox/spam filtering, website monitoring for bad links/typos, HN/Bluesky notifications, favorite director/actors/author alerts, etc.
I mostly interact with them using Slack and Email.
I don't understand people running OpenClaw. I just full shot a prompt to create a better clone. Its extremely custom to my work and flow. I use it as a personal agent, emails, slacks + as a hardcore coding agent. If it sees a problem in email it will create a ticket, assign it to an agent monitor progress, get a PR ready for me - then it harasses me until I review the PR. If I ignore the PR it will call my wife. It can also reason on what emails need critical attention etc.
When I dropped my Claude sub a few months ago I first went to try pi. At first I was a little overwhelmed by having to browse extensions to get the experience I want (coupled with finding new model providers to use).
So I looked elsewhere and found Crush and Hermes. They're both very a e s t h e t i c, which I think can make using them fun, but ultimately if I had a nitpick, I would look back over at pi, and the grass looked greener. (And not to mention, both Hermes and Crush seem to have some drama/baggage.)
I'm back on pi, and happy with just a few packages I've downloaded for it.
I still don't really get the case for OpenClaw/NanoClaw/Hermes Agent/etc. I guess it's a mix of huge stacks of notes/second brain stuff but with a way to query it, and a place where all personal "AI apps" can live ; instead of making AI apps "individually" and deploying them somewhere?
I do have a website on which I've been adding more and more stuff for personal use and for sharing with people, but when I want to develop it I do it with any agent I'm using right now (Codex, Claude Code, Pi, etc) and when I want to ask questions about it, it's usually on the public internet so any chat interface can query it. That leaves two things: asking questions about more private stuff, and possibly a "claw" that lives on your computer/on a small server is less of a pain to connect to private stuff than building a MCP and authenticate yourself through it ; and apps that themselves use models, which can be developed by the "code agent" and then I can plug whatever model I want on it.
My struggle is despite giving it a good honest go I couldn’t find the use case for OpenClaw. Maybe I and my life is just too simple, and I’ve admittedly not invested a huge effort into spending countless hours watching breathless YouTubers vying for my attention to figure it out. I have built a few bits and bobs, I feel like I’m ideal in that I’m pretty deep into agentic workflows for work, my house is totally home assistant, I’ve got current tool following models pinned to local 4090’s, I’ve been fine tuning my smaller models, i even have a custom chatterbox based tts/sst pipeline with voice nodes everywhere.
I’d love some OpenClaw master to opine on meaningful use cases beyond clawbook, checking the weather, and telling you about crypto news, as it genuinely feels like something I should find utility for but am just too old or something.
You could ask the same question about any tool ever created. Users who figure out ways to use their agents that are profitable to them make money. Everyone else spends money.
I might be a little more paranoid than most because of my profession, but none of these projects inspire enough trust to justify being installed - let alone directly on the machine I use every day.
OpenClaw, at least initially, and Hermes both appear to have been heavily astroturfed using all kinds of blackhat tactics, which is a huge red flag to me.
OpenClaw has come so far since its' original launch/craze. I recommend taking a second look if you haven't touched it in a while. If for no other reason than it's just a really fun playground with a LOT of areas to experiment in. Setup a myriad of agents with various models, skills, cron jobs, etc. The control surfaces have come a long way as well.
Hermes is good fun, running that as well but feels like they focused on polish vs features in order to capitalize on the primitive state that OpenClaw was in for its first months.
People that got attracted to the hype of openclaw but couldn't endure the fast pace of breaking changes while they figured out the problem space were well served by going to Hermes.
It turned out to be probably the crappiest, glitchiest piece of software I’ve used in the past few years. Its basic onboarding workflow was completely broken, GUI was a hallucinated mess.
Also it turned out that not a single person I know who dedicated time to configuring it, ever achieved anything remotely interesting as a result.
But what I didn't understand... what benefit does it actually bring? On a default loadout, even after disabling tons of skills in the setup wizard, there were lots of useless garbage skills enabled, over 10k of context used just to list them all.
I vibe-coded my own harness that uses ACP so it supports any coding CLI that exposes ACP (copilot cli, opencode, basically every popular one with official or non-official wrappers). And I was able to achieve basically exactly what I wanted from any Claw-like agent, in like a few hours.
I know there's way, way more to these self-sufficient agents (compaction, memory system, etc) but in my mind, it feels like the closer you can be to a barebones "coding agent core" plus "gateways that point to it" the better.
I still use Hermes because it's not a problem I care about solving right now and am spending my time and tokens on more important problems. I don't plan to always use it, and if anything it gives me ideas for what the ideal shape of what I want would be.
Also to add, having a unified space to chat with an agent that has a local system it can work with is quite liberating because I use it to drive my agent orchestration system. So I'm no longer bound to my computer or any one providers harness and whatever mobile solution they provide if any. It's been quite freeing and I don't use Hermes that differently than I would chatgpt, except it know exactly how I like to do my work and that means I have to remind it less.
https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187581
- teknium1 retitled the original issue to "." and edited the issue text to "."
- Nous Research deleted comments from 4 users, including the issue submitter, and blocked all of them.
- No formal response has been given by teknium or the Nous Research project. It appears they are trying their darndest to brush it under the rug.
Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318706
Seems like both projects are a bit unprofessional in terms of leaders. Hermes just tries to sound more authoritative with the "Nous Research" name and fancy site, etc.
https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
Boo fucking hoo. The desktop agent space converges on a small set of features that overlap. Grow the fuck up.
"Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel"
https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1u5ukz6/hermes...
Basically: it is a free service, free is good, why are you being difficult?
People running Hermes on local models thought their data was theirs, but what if the model is not the only leakage vector??
tl;dr for people who just read the inaccurate quote: It was the default search provider (for free), if you configured anything else, it was not used. They removed the default.
[1] https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
Not that they stole code or even copy, just the idea from a completely open source project (at the time).
Given how many people have posted and released similar systems over the time skills came out and even before, that's a huge claim with no substance to back it.
Not particularly. But at least that source tries to explain what happened.
2. In the future, there won't be copyright. Or open source. Or anything "owned". It can all just be copied trivially, and there's literally no stopping it.
3. I don't know how to feel about any of that. This is so new and complicated. The whole world is changing dramatically and being completely reshaped.
Wasn't there some news a while ago that Anthropic and other frontier model companies used a bunch of pirated books to train their models? Are we not all benefiting from the fact that they also crawled a bunch of open code repos?
If something is open source, it's pretty easy to tell if code is pulled directly from another repo and included in a project. It's much harder to know if whatever model was building something pulled from it (through training or simply searching online).
It was Meta. With Zuck's explicit permission.
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge...
The behaviour by NousResearch is a bit bad (if I am understanding it correctly, I can be wrong, I usually am) but given its an open source project. I don't think that accredition makes a project bad and I simply don't understand the rationale behind a lot of it and streissand effect is starting to kick in the more they might be trying to hide it.
Why not just accredit EvoMap's Evolver or come up with an official statement or have a proper discussion between the two teams
> The behaviour by NousResearch is so bad given its an open source project. I don't think that accredition makes a project bad and I simply don't understand the rationale behind a lot of it and streissand effect is starting to kick in the more they might be trying to hide it.
> Why not just accredit EvoMap's Evolver or come up with an official statement or have a proper discussion between the two teams
I used OpenClaw -> Hermes -> my own thing now.
I've got things like code review, email inbox/spam filtering, website monitoring for bad links/typos, HN/Bluesky notifications, favorite director/actors/author alerts, etc.
I mostly interact with them using Slack and Email.
persistent memory plus cron job lets you do stuff that you can't do with just codex/claude code/opencode
So I looked elsewhere and found Crush and Hermes. They're both very a e s t h e t i c, which I think can make using them fun, but ultimately if I had a nitpick, I would look back over at pi, and the grass looked greener. (And not to mention, both Hermes and Crush seem to have some drama/baggage.)
I'm back on pi, and happy with just a few packages I've downloaded for it.
It feels like when you do a fresh Windows install and you have to debloat it from all the spyware and candy crush type games.
Pi is the perfect clean slate, I absolutely love it.
I do have a website on which I've been adding more and more stuff for personal use and for sharing with people, but when I want to develop it I do it with any agent I'm using right now (Codex, Claude Code, Pi, etc) and when I want to ask questions about it, it's usually on the public internet so any chat interface can query it. That leaves two things: asking questions about more private stuff, and possibly a "claw" that lives on your computer/on a small server is less of a pain to connect to private stuff than building a MCP and authenticate yourself through it ; and apps that themselves use models, which can be developed by the "code agent" and then I can plug whatever model I want on it.
I’d love some OpenClaw master to opine on meaningful use cases beyond clawbook, checking the weather, and telling you about crypto news, as it genuinely feels like something I should find utility for but am just too old or something.
It only appears that the hosting providers are and not the user spending thousands of dollars on these agents.
Not that I'd blame you. Hermes is really great.
Nope!
And a uv.lock is also there...
OpenClaw, at least initially, and Hermes both appear to have been heavily astroturfed using all kinds of blackhat tactics, which is a huge red flag to me.
And then there is the code.