Hermes: The OpenClaw Killer

While I was sitting there, fully immersed in the podcast flow, the winds of change had already swept through the world of AI agents, and I’m here to share the news with you.

The old OpenClaw meta is now like a withered leaf blown away by the wind, while Hermes shines like the morning star.

Thanks Durov for the AI right in the text input field, but I’ll stick to my own words.

Hermes is an OpenClaw alternative with a different architecture. Written in Python. The main thing is that it has self-learning mechanisms baked right into the algorithm. The authors say Hermes grows alongside you.

I’ve been working with it for a week now and moved pretty much everything over from OpenClaw. Everything Glasha used to do now goes through Hermes. Even though it’s still rough around the edges, it works way more predictably.

Plus, while it’s running tasks, you can throw messages at it and they’ll get mixed into the current session on the fly. And if you see it doing something wrong, you can steer it and stop it. That’s a massive advantage.

They recently rolled out profile support, so you can host multiple different agents on one server. Right now on my MacBook I’ve got Hermes running with three agent profiles, each doing different tasks without interfering with each other, but sharing the same environment, same skills, all that common stuff. Though their memory, session history, and the tools they create for themselves stay separate.

And just like that, less than a month later, OpenClaw is already outdated, and a smart, self-learning Hermes awaits us.