7 ms·

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' origina

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.

needz 3mo ago
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.
- Multiplayer 3mo ago
  I wasn't trying to go point to point - my point was that its enjoyable to play with. As is Hermes!
atemerev 3mo ago
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/ https://lethe.gg/ (open source, written in Rust, hosted version available).
- subscribed 3mo ago
  It's wonderful, I like it a lot, thank you, need to check on that.
- goobatrooba 3mo ago
  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?
  - Yiin 3mo ago
    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)
nlitened 3mo ago
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.
- mikenew 3mo ago
  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.
- paulcole 3mo ago
  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?
- noufalibrahim 3mo ago
  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.
  - beedle_mcdeedle 3mo ago
    It’s nice that they closed deals but pretty soon this kind of bot spam is going to drown everything out IMO
hasteg 3mo ago
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.
jas8425 3mo ago
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?
- deadbabe 3mo ago
  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)
cowpig 3mo ago
openclaw is for larping
ChadMoran 3mo ago
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.
pkulak 3mo ago
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/opencrow * https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/opencrow https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/ope...
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
  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 https://zot.sh for something completely in golang and also https://maki.sh/ 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.
joshstrange 3mo ago
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.
Rekindle8090 3mo ago
[dead]

needz 3mo ago

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.

Multiplayer 3mo ago
I wasn't trying to go point to point - my point was that its enjoyable to play with. As is Hermes!

atemerev 3mo ago

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/ https://lethe.gg/ (open source, written in Rust, hosted version available).

subscribed 3mo ago
It's wonderful, I like it a lot, thank you, need to check on that.
goobatrooba 3mo ago
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?
- Yiin 3mo ago
  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)

nlitened 3mo ago

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.

mikenew 3mo ago
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.
paulcole 3mo ago
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?
noufalibrahim 3mo ago
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.
- beedle_mcdeedle 3mo ago
  It’s nice that they closed deals but pretty soon this kind of bot spam is going to drown everything out IMO

hasteg 3mo ago

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.

jas8425 3mo ago

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?

deadbabe 3mo ago
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)

cowpig 3mo ago

openclaw is for larping

ChadMoran 3mo ago

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.

pkulak 3mo ago

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/opencrow * https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/opencrow https://github.com/pkulak/nix/tree/main/modules/features/ope...

Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
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 https://zot.sh for something completely in golang and also https://maki.sh/ 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.

joshstrange 3mo ago

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.

Rekindle8090 3mo ago

[dead]