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.
That was my experience a couple months ago, and until someone shows me real evidence of something valuable they've made with it, I'm not wasting my time on this stuff again.
A friend of mine automated the lead generation and marketing function of his tiny startup using OpenClaw and set of skills he wrote for it. It would find potential leads (from a list of sources), contact them, score them and keep the owner informed via. Slack about what's going on. They actually closed a few deals following up on leads generated by their bots.
Yes. That is an insight but then again, most marketing emails were templatised slop1.0 from mailchimp and other sites. This just makes it slicker. So, I'm not sure.
I don't think I share your experience.
I've been using open claw for the past 3 months and it has some quirks but it works pretty well.
The web UI is not the nicest but it gets the job done and you rarely interact with it through that interface. You use telegram, WhatsApp, discord, etc.
The CLI install flow is one of the best I've seen. It really takes you through every single step to set everything up.
I've helped organized the Openclaw events in Dublin where we usually have 80 to 100 people come and we've seen great success with the install flow. Especially for non-technical people.
The biggest issue was with Windows and WSL but other than that no major problems. It's not perfect but it works pretty well.
My Mac Mini took so long to arrive that I never messed with OpenClaw/Hermes and just went straight to Claude CoWork w/ Dispatch from my phone. One of the biggest blessings in disguise I can remember.
I read /r/openclaw for ideas on automations and 95% of the content is complaints or people having it do things that just don't need to be done.
As a side question for anyone reading this, what are the best agentic AI subreddits for people who are actually using it for work and not just personal dashboards?
I tried OpenClaw, but holy smokes, that project is bigger than Postrgres. All I want is a Pi session I can put on a server and load up with skills, that I can chat with over matrix.
To that end, I found this amazing project called OpenCrow. It's aggressively DM chat, and I wanted support for group chats (so it can be a household helper), so I forked* it and made it exactly what I want.
Now I actually have two personal agents, one just for me, and one for the household. They are each in their own container, and the whole thing is managed by my Nix* config.
Dendritic flake! Love to see it. Curious though, if you just import the default.nix and the default.nix imports everything, why not just import everything in modules/ and hosts/?
Hmmm... not sure I understand. My setup recursively imports every default.nix in modules and hosts. About that... I don't have a really great defense. It's how the little template I started out with did it. :D I do like it though.
the usual practise when using flake-parts and import-tree is to forego the default.nix completely and just import the entire folder without needing to explicitly register each file in a default.nix. you can view an example at my flake here:
Oh! Yes, you're totally right. I remember going to a bit of trouble in the beginning to filter to default.nix, because yes, the template absolutely just imported everything. I must have had some good reason, but that reason is lost to time.
Not totally sure, but I feel like importing that wouldn't work. Probably you're supposed to put packages in their own place, I guess. But yeah, what I've got works. haha
Unrelated, but thanks for sharing your config! There are a lot of really good ideas in there, and I've only looked at a few files.
This is a genuinely interesting project. Thanks for sharing it for what its worth, I think it fits my definition of minimalist for the most part.
Do you have anything for pi in general as well? I have currently tried out oh-my-pi and (well previously opencode) and I know about https://zot.sh for something completely in golang and also https://maki.sh/ both of which are created by another HN user.
I have found projects created by frequent HN users (in terms of how much they interact with the site) to be genuinely useful/interesting within this space as compared to complete hype. I might bet there to be a very significant overlap and thus, it might be a good filter for these AI projects.
Now aside from this one of the things that I want is I have found opencode + obra/superpowers to be a bit token intensive but its much more hands driven development and the AI doesn't completely go amok. I basically just want to replicate something like this either in pi or rust/golang alternative of it as well and then to use it completely with mobile phone as a means of interaction using say matrix protocol. (Optionally: I have glm 5.2 previous coding subscription where the rate limits is actually 5 hour rolling window rather than weekly so I would like to make it re-run/continue automatically after the 5 hour window on a project just continously to build on the side to use those tokens and just building something in an AFK fashion.)
This might be my ideal workflow, Given that Pi is extensible, I think that Opencrow/your fork of it can be useful in one of the pieces of this ideal workflow. I'd be genuinely curious as it wasn't until quite recently that I went from my minimalist model of defaults to customizations/skills.md and I am just dabbling on different levels of complexity to find out what makes the right sense of having complexity towards on.
I've tried Nanoclaw and Openclaw and I found them both to be steaming piles of crap. Both of them broke in record time (less than about 1 week). And yes, I tried OpenClaw from scratch just ~3 weeks ago. The config pages made my brain melt and were buggy as hell. I've never dealt with something so frustrating that has so many people pretending it's the second coming of jesus.
I just want claude code accessible through Discord (or Telegram or anything, I don't care what).
While it's _far_ from what I really want, my best setup currently is Blink Shell on iOS -> Mosh to my computer -> Run Claude Code.
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 really want to like these "agentic assistant" tools, because I feel like the problem they claim to solve is real: give me an interface across desktop and mobile to a persistent backend where I can set up agents (using natural language) to do... whatever I want. Deep market research? Building + hosting a browser game? Checking my email? etc.
But after trying both Hermes and OpenClaw, it feels like they both... miss the point? Last time I tried OpenClaw it wanted to download something like 11 GB of local models to do... something (embeddings for memory indexing or chat labeling/classification maybe?) which my sorry old 16gb M1 is certainly not capable of running.
Hermes seems to suffer from the same problem: why do I need to download (and then immediately disable to avoid confusing my poor "agents"... a concept which I also feel like way too many tools fundamentally misunderstand) skills for managing Spotify playlists or pokemon or minecraft in order to run the thing? (I acknowledge that they cleaned some of this up in a recent release, so maybe this isn't as bad as it was when I last tried it)
WRT "agents"... can someone explain to me why there's so much effort put into naming agents and giving them personalities? An "agent" is simply a separate context window with different prompting (itself written by the spawning/parent "agent") that's specific to a partial slice of the task you're trying to solve. If you have to write their prompt ahead of time that defeats the whole purpose of a programmable, autonomous subagent, doesn't it?
People want to think of their computers as a little dollhouse of AI running around doing stuff for them.
OpenClaw is just a toy. There is no use case for it and I haven’t heard of anyone do anything remotely interesting with it. People like to vaguely say it “manages” stuff for them, whatever that means.
Anything requiring serious automation can be automated deterministically via a script, probably written by an LLM.
If you want a coding agent, get a coding agent, you do not need OpenClaw.
What an enormous waste of money and effort (Actually, there’s no effort at all, it’s just AI slop running wild)
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).
Sounds like an interesting project but the copywriting is not clear how the 20$ and using different models interact. Does the hosted version come with credits or a model included?
And is the only way to interact telegram? I see the simple appeal but why send everything through a russian app?
Russia would love for telegram to be Russian app, unfortunately for them, there is nothing to suggest that's the case as plenty of examples why it's not (one being that tg is banned in Russia)
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 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.
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.
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.
Looking at their blog about it, I don't think Evolver has any claim to be honest. They make such generic claims as that session history was copied because they implemented their history in some `.jsonl` files while Hermes has a session history using sqlite FTS. Evolver better have some attribution crediting Anthropic for their session history feature, because as far as I can tell they've had that implemented since early 2025! Using .jsonl files no less, coincidentally the same way that Evolver decided to implement session history.
I was expecting them to show code samples or something, but to me it looks more like these were two projects that ended up coming up with similar looking features, even with different implementations of these features. I don't see how Nous Research owes them any explanation, especially since at least from that linked issue they were coming in really hot with accusations of plagiarism. If I owned a large OSS project that amassed issues/discussions/PRs at a rate of ~4k per month I would probably also treat this kind of thing as spam.
"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.
Note that the polymarket skill was for using it as a research source, not for placing wagers, and has since been removed as part of a larger streamlining of the included set of skills.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I set up a Hermes agent for our company and connected it to BigQuery, Stripe, Amplitude, etc so that our nontechnical teammates can ask and answer their own data questions via Slack. It works great!
I similarly haven’t found it useful to run a bunch of these agents in developing the product, but it’s a nice interface for people who don’t live in their terminal all day.
Not being snarky, it seems to be Anthropic's value prop to "real" SMB is papering over Claude Code and agent protocol with a white collar business IDE.
Most of these "runs on a Mac Mini!" offerings seem to be "hipper than thou" variants for the LinkedInfluencer class, while Cowork is for the workplace.
There seem to be effectively zero Cowork alternatives that understand most SMB don't run on Google Workspace and Slack (or Hetzner and Telegram).
can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff? I get lost in fact that people can't really understand that end of day this is just llm calls with like sqlite facade. I see the value is the convenience only of not having to set stuff up, but everyone else claims it does all this extra stuff that is not trivial to reproduce yourself.
> can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff?
Approximately zero. Grifters, FOMO driven technophiles, and wannabe "founders" jumped on the bandwagon because it was "the next big thing" (where did I hear that before?). Now that the creator got cushy job at OpenAI, and the hype is over, it's just another tech bro toy to burn tokens with and scratch your OCD.
I have Hermes on my list of things to try but I've been massively underwhelmed by both NanoClaw and OpenClaw.
Both of them broke on me and were maddening to try and debug. I'd get them working then 1-2 days later send a message and get no reply. I went round and round with OpenClaw (seriously, "openclaw doctor" is a sick joke) before finally nuking the VM.
I want the simplest of things: Claude Code + My Obsidian Vault. That's it. I didn't even add other MCPs or Skills, I tried using Nano/OpenClaw and they both just fell over after a couple days.
I'm probably best served by just vibecoding my own tool since these things try to be too many things to too many people and end up failing.
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.
There are lots of relational databases today; MySQL, Postgres, Oracle etc. But IBM's System R established the pattern in 1974, and later IBM products SQL/DS and DB2. And of course their competitor, Oracle. OpenClaw might not have been the absolute exact first, but it did establish the pattern and is the head of the family tree of modern agents, stretching back, oh, about 7 months now. Of course there will be better architectures. Functional AI Agents deployable at home didn't exist a year ago.
OpenClaw deserves a lot of credit for making these things more accessible and understandable to people. It really popularized the idea of async agents. But yeah, I also created a different solution that I prefer.
You can build your own, but it won’t give you social currency the way it does when you just tell people “Yea I use OpenClaw”. They already know OpenClaw and what it’s about so you instantly gain rapport vs having to explain your custom agent system that they will doubt is better than OpenClaw and probably write you off as a crank.
Claude at least has had memory for months, and also has scheduling now (and knows cron better than you or I, and can easily trigger itself on a schedule)
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 want to move away from claude but don't have the hardware for "good" local llms, and would rather use a ZDR api instead of one of the big apis for privacy reasons.
Yeah, everyone has built their own version of all this shit.
I built smth similar which lets you delegate from say local model to Claude or mimicode to pi. It does audited, workspace segregated mcp calls with only 3 tools ever in context. It can store skills, cross harness memory, inbuilt AI first task manager. Workflows that can run on triggers or schedules which take skills, a model, a prompt and a hand picked set of mcp tools (very granular).
I use this to let me know what’s going on, to save tokens in Claude by delegating to MiMo and deepseek, and local models in pi.
No one using these things has a use case for them - if they did they’d have built it themselves like I have. Because with ai… you can!
Oh and it can work via telegram (cos if it doesn’t is it even an ai harness token furnace!!??)
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.
I have the same feeling. I'm even trying to argument to myself upgrading my phone to something newer that would support AI better but I genuinely can't. The only use case I could ever need is maybe(!) using it to fill up shopping list out loud but at this point it, using shared Google Keep it's roughly the same amount of work to just type it. In professional matter though, having an AI agent on Slack, that can query readonly dbs for us, check things, debug problems reported by our users, it's pretty great.
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.
This doesn’t get called out enough. Although actually come to think of it, I think it could be against HN guidelines to accuse things of being Astroturfed!
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.
> Users who figure out ways to use their agents that are profitable to them make money
Does anyone know any of these users? Most of the agentic-coding boosters seem to be pretty much exclusively building personal knowledge bases and more agentic coding tools
I cant wait to see what the new OpenCode plugin system looks like. I'm hoping that it allows us to get somewhat in-depth with the Effect.ts underpinnings. There's so much potential here. There also needs to be some real ability to shape/drive/control the loop, where-as right now, plugins tend to be more augmentative, rather than able to contribute to steering. Those are two huge barriers, and I realize OpenCode is thought of as a coding tool, but conceptually these loop systems seem not really so far apart.
The purpose of these systems is not to be a system, it's to be a platform/substrate for agency expansion. Whoever can best expose their capabilities (without having to many tattering detractors) is ultimately going to be the winner.
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.
That was my experience a couple months ago, and until someone shows me real evidence of something valuable they've made with it, I'm not wasting my time on this stuff again.
I'm not so sure of that.
A friend of mine automated the lead generation and marketing function of his tiny startup using OpenClaw and set of skills he wrote for it. It would find potential leads (from a list of sources), contact them, score them and keep the owner informed via. Slack about what's going on. They actually closed a few deals following up on leads generated by their bots.
It’s nice that they closed deals but pretty soon this kind of bot spam is going to drown everything out IMO
One success case doesn't prove the comment you responded to isn't true.
It literally does though? GP said they'd never seen anyone achieve anything interesting.
The person you're replying to said they know someone who closed a few deals as a result of their OpenClaw. How is that not interesting?
It doesn't prove that it's globally useful, well implemented, or even worth the cost/effort. But it is something interesting.
You know what, you're right. Somehow between reading the parent comment and this one, I forgot the details of it. My mistake.
But did you notice that all such success stories is someone automated marketing or generation of slop content?
Yes. That is an insight but then again, most marketing emails were templatised slop1.0 from mailchimp and other sites. This just makes it slicker. So, I'm not sure.
I don't think I share your experience. I've been using open claw for the past 3 months and it has some quirks but it works pretty well. The web UI is not the nicest but it gets the job done and you rarely interact with it through that interface. You use telegram, WhatsApp, discord, etc. The CLI install flow is one of the best I've seen. It really takes you through every single step to set everything up. I've helped organized the Openclaw events in Dublin where we usually have 80 to 100 people come and we've seen great success with the install flow. Especially for non-technical people. The biggest issue was with Windows and WSL but other than that no major problems. It's not perfect but it works pretty well.
My Mac Mini took so long to arrive that I never messed with OpenClaw/Hermes and just went straight to Claude CoWork w/ Dispatch from my phone. One of the biggest blessings in disguise I can remember.
I read /r/openclaw for ideas on automations and 95% of the content is complaints or people having it do things that just don't need to be done.
As a side question for anyone reading this, what are the best agentic AI subreddits for people who are actually using it for work and not just personal dashboards?
I tried OpenClaw, but holy smokes, that project is bigger than Postrgres. All I want is a Pi session I can put on a server and load up with skills, that I can chat with over matrix.
To that end, I found this amazing project called OpenCrow. It's aggressively DM chat, and I wanted support for group chats (so it can be a household helper), so I forked* it and made it exactly what I want.
Now I actually have two personal agents, one just for me, and one for the household. They are each in their own container, and the whole thing is managed by my Nix* config.
* https://github.com/pkulak/opencrow
* https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/ope...
Dendritic flake! Love to see it. Curious though, if you just import the default.nix and the default.nix imports everything, why not just import everything in modules/ and hosts/?
Hmmm... not sure I understand. My setup recursively imports every default.nix in modules and hosts. About that... I don't have a really great defense. It's how the little template I started out with did it. :D I do like it though.
the usual practise when using flake-parts and import-tree is to forego the default.nix completely and just import the entire folder without needing to explicitly register each file in a default.nix. you can view an example at my flake here:
https://github.com/rrvsh/tools/blob/256b38535d62a2930ad27161... https://github.com/rrvsh/tools/tree/256b38535d62a2930ad27161...
but its just a different way to do things, not a better way! if you like it, you should keep it :)
Oh! Yes, you're totally right. I remember going to a bit of trouble in the beginning to filter to default.nix, because yes, the template absolutely just imported everything. I must have had some good reason, but that reason is lost to time.
Maybe because I have stuff like this: https://github.com/pkulak/nix/blob/main/modules/features/jai...
Not totally sure, but I feel like importing that wouldn't work. Probably you're supposed to put packages in their own place, I guess. But yeah, what I've got works. haha
Unrelated, but thanks for sharing your config! There are a lot of really good ideas in there, and I've only looked at a few files.
This is a genuinely interesting project. Thanks for sharing it for what its worth, I think it fits my definition of minimalist for the most part.
Do you have anything for pi in general as well? I have currently tried out oh-my-pi and (well previously opencode) and I know about https://zot.sh for something completely in golang and also https://maki.sh/ both of which are created by another HN user.
I have found projects created by frequent HN users (in terms of how much they interact with the site) to be genuinely useful/interesting within this space as compared to complete hype. I might bet there to be a very significant overlap and thus, it might be a good filter for these AI projects.
Now aside from this one of the things that I want is I have found opencode + obra/superpowers to be a bit token intensive but its much more hands driven development and the AI doesn't completely go amok. I basically just want to replicate something like this either in pi or rust/golang alternative of it as well and then to use it completely with mobile phone as a means of interaction using say matrix protocol. (Optionally: I have glm 5.2 previous coding subscription where the rate limits is actually 5 hour rolling window rather than weekly so I would like to make it re-run/continue automatically after the 5 hour window on a project just continously to build on the side to use those tokens and just building something in an AFK fashion.)
This might be my ideal workflow, Given that Pi is extensible, I think that Opencrow/your fork of it can be useful in one of the pieces of this ideal workflow. I'd be genuinely curious as it wasn't until quite recently that I went from my minimalist model of defaults to customizations/skills.md and I am just dabbling on different levels of complexity to find out what makes the right sense of having complexity towards on.
I've tried Nanoclaw and Openclaw and I found them both to be steaming piles of crap. Both of them broke in record time (less than about 1 week). And yes, I tried OpenClaw from scratch just ~3 weeks ago. The config pages made my brain melt and were buggy as hell. I've never dealt with something so frustrating that has so many people pretending it's the second coming of jesus.
I just want claude code accessible through Discord (or Telegram or anything, I don't care what).
While it's _far_ from what I really want, my best setup currently is Blink Shell on iOS -> Mosh to my computer -> Run Claude Code.
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.
I wasn't trying to go point to point - my point was that its enjoyable to play with. As is Hermes!
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 really want to like these "agentic assistant" tools, because I feel like the problem they claim to solve is real: give me an interface across desktop and mobile to a persistent backend where I can set up agents (using natural language) to do... whatever I want. Deep market research? Building + hosting a browser game? Checking my email? etc.
But after trying both Hermes and OpenClaw, it feels like they both... miss the point? Last time I tried OpenClaw it wanted to download something like 11 GB of local models to do... something (embeddings for memory indexing or chat labeling/classification maybe?) which my sorry old 16gb M1 is certainly not capable of running.
Hermes seems to suffer from the same problem: why do I need to download (and then immediately disable to avoid confusing my poor "agents"... a concept which I also feel like way too many tools fundamentally misunderstand) skills for managing Spotify playlists or pokemon or minecraft in order to run the thing? (I acknowledge that they cleaned some of this up in a recent release, so maybe this isn't as bad as it was when I last tried it)
WRT "agents"... can someone explain to me why there's so much effort put into naming agents and giving them personalities? An "agent" is simply a separate context window with different prompting (itself written by the spawning/parent "agent") that's specific to a partial slice of the task you're trying to solve. If you have to write their prompt ahead of time that defeats the whole purpose of a programmable, autonomous subagent, doesn't it?
People want to think of their computers as a little dollhouse of AI running around doing stuff for them.
OpenClaw is just a toy. There is no use case for it and I haven’t heard of anyone do anything remotely interesting with it. People like to vaguely say it “manages” stuff for them, whatever that means.
Anything requiring serious automation can be automated deterministically via a script, probably written by an LLM.
If you want a coding agent, get a coding agent, you do not need OpenClaw.
What an enormous waste of money and effort (Actually, there’s no effort at all, it’s just AI slop running wild)
OpenClaw feels messy and unpolished. It's powerful but unreliable.
Hermes is focused, tight and does exactly what it set out to do. I already moved to Hermes.
openclaw is for larping
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).
Sounds like an interesting project but the copywriting is not clear how the 20$ and using different models interact. Does the hosted version come with credits or a model included?
And is the only way to interact telegram? I see the simple appeal but why send everything through a russian app?
Russia would love for telegram to be Russian app, unfortunately for them, there is nothing to suggest that's the case as plenty of examples why it's not (one being that tg is banned in Russia)
It's wonderful, I like it a lot, thank you, need to check on that.
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 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.
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.
It's probably good to at least be aware of the plagiarism debacle around Hermes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187581
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.
I'm sorry but if this is not a debacle, then we're operating under very different premises:
- 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
Looking at their blog about it, I don't think Evolver has any claim to be honest. They make such generic claims as that session history was copied because they implemented their history in some `.jsonl` files while Hermes has a session history using sqlite FTS. Evolver better have some attribution crediting Anthropic for their session history feature, because as far as I can tell they've had that implemented since early 2025! Using .jsonl files no less, coincidentally the same way that Evolver decided to implement session history.
I was expecting them to show code samples or something, but to me it looks more like these were two projects that ended up coming up with similar looking features, even with different implementations of these features. I don't see how Nous Research owes them any explanation, especially since at least from that linked issue they were coming in really hot with accusations of plagiarism. If I owned a large OSS project that amassed issues/discussions/PRs at a rate of ~4k per month I would probably also treat this kind of thing as spam.
"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.
Note that the polymarket skill was for using it as a research source, not for placing wagers, and has since been removed as part of a larger streamlining of the included set of skills.
I think they probably understand that those complaints hold weight within a <=2010s ethical framework but now we live in the brave new world.
I have no idea what these three things mean without more context.
Looks like the complainant blogged about it here:
https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
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.
This [0] is the issue in question. teknium1 replaced the entire issue text with a dot, and NousResearch deleted a bunch of subsequent comments.
Whether the claims have merit or not, attempting to make the claim go away in this way is at best unprofessional and childish.
[0] https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/10232
> teknium1 replaced the entire issue
I guess I’m confused about (and more concerned with) the merits of the issue.
If the merits are serious, this is a cover-up. If they’re specious, this is like forum drama. From what I can tell so far, it looks like the latter.
Evolver claims are complete nonsense. Teknium has responded several times on Twitter. This is a closed issue.
And this weirdness:
"Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel"
https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1u5ukz6/hermes...
Wow, the response from their team was really awful.
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??
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.
And already removed: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350
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.
Linking to the claim [1] might be stronger.
[1] https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
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.
> Did you read it?
Not particularly. But at least that source tries to explain what happened.
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.
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.
1. This is bad, if true.
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?
It was Meta. With Zuck's explicit permission.
& Anthropic owes $1.5b
https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge...
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.
I set up a Hermes agent for our company and connected it to BigQuery, Stripe, Amplitude, etc so that our nontechnical teammates can ask and answer their own data questions via Slack. It works great!
I similarly haven’t found it useful to run a bunch of these agents in developing the product, but it’s a nice interface for people who don’t live in their terminal all day.
So, Cowork?
Not being snarky, it seems to be Anthropic's value prop to "real" SMB is papering over Claude Code and agent protocol with a white collar business IDE.
Most of these "runs on a Mac Mini!" offerings seem to be "hipper than thou" variants for the LinkedInfluencer class, while Cowork is for the workplace.
There seem to be effectively zero Cowork alternatives that understand most SMB don't run on Google Workspace and Slack (or Hetzner and Telegram).
can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff? I get lost in fact that people can't really understand that end of day this is just llm calls with like sqlite facade. I see the value is the convenience only of not having to set stuff up, but everyone else claims it does all this extra stuff that is not trivial to reproduce yourself.
> can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff?
Approximately zero. Grifters, FOMO driven technophiles, and wannabe "founders" jumped on the bandwagon because it was "the next big thing" (where did I hear that before?). Now that the creator got cushy job at OpenAI, and the hype is over, it's just another tech bro toy to burn tokens with and scratch your OCD.
This is specifically for migrating to Hermes from OpenClaw. The title should suggest that.
I have Hermes on my list of things to try but I've been massively underwhelmed by both NanoClaw and OpenClaw.
Both of them broke on me and were maddening to try and debug. I'd get them working then 1-2 days later send a message and get no reply. I went round and round with OpenClaw (seriously, "openclaw doctor" is a sick joke) before finally nuking the VM.
I want the simplest of things: Claude Code + My Obsidian Vault. That's it. I didn't even add other MCPs or Skills, I tried using Nano/OpenClaw and they both just fell over after a couple days.
I'm probably best served by just vibecoding my own tool since these things try to be too many things to too many people and end up failing.
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.
There are lots of relational databases today; MySQL, Postgres, Oracle etc. But IBM's System R established the pattern in 1974, and later IBM products SQL/DS and DB2. And of course their competitor, Oracle. OpenClaw might not have been the absolute exact first, but it did establish the pattern and is the head of the family tree of modern agents, stretching back, oh, about 7 months now. Of course there will be better architectures. Functional AI Agents deployable at home didn't exist a year ago.
OpenClaw deserves a lot of credit for making these things more accessible and understandable to people. It really popularized the idea of async agents. But yeah, I also created a different solution that I prefer.
You can build your own, but it won’t give you social currency the way it does when you just tell people “Yea I use OpenClaw”. They already know OpenClaw and what it’s about so you instantly gain rapport vs having to explain your custom agent system that they will doubt is better than OpenClaw and probably write you off as a crank.
Good point, I will make it OpenClaw alpha
I don't get it, why not put codex/claude code/opencode in a docker container and be done with it?
openclaw = claude code + memory + cron job
persistent memory plus cron job lets you do stuff that you can't do with just codex/claude code/opencode
Claude at least has had memory for months, and also has scheduling now (and knows cron better than you or I, and can easily trigger itself on a schedule)
Why not just use one of the hundreds of persistent memory projects with Codex CLI/Codex App? Plus Codex App has scheduled tasks too.
It's not really the same thing. They're different tools. Open claw is targeted more towards non-technical people.
This is what https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion does
Does Hermes still come bundled with a Polymarket skill enabled by default?
https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-...
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.
what model(s) did you end up using with pi?
I want to move away from claude but don't have the hardware for "good" local llms, and would rather use a ZDR api instead of one of the big apis for privacy reasons.
I understand that hermes needs to do be able to do "everything" but I can't stand how much crap comes along with 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.
Yeah, everyone has built their own version of all this shit.
I built smth similar which lets you delegate from say local model to Claude or mimicode to pi. It does audited, workspace segregated mcp calls with only 3 tools ever in context. It can store skills, cross harness memory, inbuilt AI first task manager. Workflows that can run on triggers or schedules which take skills, a model, a prompt and a hand picked set of mcp tools (very granular).
I use this to let me know what’s going on, to save tokens in Claude by delegating to MiMo and deepseek, and local models in pi.
No one using these things has a use case for them - if they did they’d have built it themselves like I have. Because with ai… you can!
Oh and it can work via telegram (cos if it doesn’t is it even an ai harness token furnace!!??)
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.
I have the same feeling. I'm even trying to argument to myself upgrading my phone to something newer that would support AI better but I genuinely can't. The only use case I could ever need is maybe(!) using it to fill up shopping list out loud but at this point it, using shared Google Keep it's roughly the same amount of work to just type it. In professional matter though, having an AI agent on Slack, that can query readonly dbs for us, check things, debug problems reported by our users, it's pretty great.
Is it bad that I want to try Hermes but look at the code and see setup.py and no project.toml and it gives me pause?
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.
And then there is the code.
This doesn’t get called out enough. Although actually come to think of it, I think it could be against HN guidelines to accuse things of being Astroturfed!
There’s also no evidence for it aside from “stars go up too much” and “my social circle isn’t talking about it”, so that could be a reason!
You should be looking for a pyproject.toml: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/blob/main/pypro...
And a uv.lock is also there...
My bad... saw the setup.py and quickly posted.
Other than the hosting providers, who is making money directly from OpenClaw or Hermes Agent?
It only appears that the hosting providers are and not the user spending thousands of dollars on these agents.
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.
> Users who figure out ways to use their agents that are profitable to them make money
Does anyone know any of these users? Most of the agentic-coding boosters seem to be pretty much exclusively building personal knowledge bases and more agentic coding tools
OpenJaw.
I cant wait to see what the new OpenCode plugin system looks like. I'm hoping that it allows us to get somewhat in-depth with the Effect.ts underpinnings. There's so much potential here. There also needs to be some real ability to shape/drive/control the loop, where-as right now, plugins tend to be more augmentative, rather than able to contribute to steering. Those are two huge barriers, and I realize OpenCode is thought of as a coding tool, but conceptually these loop systems seem not really so far apart.
The purpose of these systems is not to be a system, it's to be a platform/substrate for agency expansion. Whoever can best expose their capabilities (without having to many tattering detractors) is ultimately going to be the winner.