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47% Positive
Analyzed from 2159 words in the discussion.
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#hermes#openclaw#agent#code#more#don#etc#project#open#memory
Discussion (55 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
persistent memory plus cron job lets you do stuff that you can't do with just codex/claude code/opencode
https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-...
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.
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.