Hermes Agent might have just killed OpenClaw transcript

A few months ago, I made a video comparing Open Claw to Hermes Agent. Back then, it was a real decision. Open Claw had real advantage, and Hermes had real advantages as well. You had to choose which set of trade-offs you were willing to live with. Today, I don't think that gap exists anymore. In fact, I think Hermes has closed the gap, and in a lot of areas it has moved miles ahead of Open Claw. The easiest way I can explain it is this.

When a friend who is not deep in AI agents asks me, "What should I install?" I no longer give them a long comparison. I just say, "Install Hermes." Let's get into it. I want to start by making this clear. This is not an Open Claw hate or diss video. Open Claw was my main system for a long time. I built a lot of great workflows with it. I made videos on it. I still think it helped define what personal AI agents can look like.

But, the problem with these tools is not whether they look impressive in a demo. The real question is, do you actually keep using them after the first month, two, three, year? Do you trust them enough to run your workflows? Do you wake up and naturally find yourself messaging the agent? Do you feel like it is reducing maintenance, or do you feel like you became the maintenance team for it? That is where my answer changed over the last few weeks.

My Open Claw chat has slowly become a ghost town. I barely message it anymore. I find myself waking up, going straight to Hermes, check what it is doing, but I brainstorm with it, I ask it for content ideas, I ask it to do research, I ask it to help me fix problems, and the funniest part is that I have now used Hermes help me fix open claw when open claw breaks. That is when I knew the switch was bound to happen. In my first comparison video, there was a meaningful gap between these two tools.

Open claw had certain strength and Hermes had certain other strength. If you wanted one type of workflow, open claw made more sense. If you wanted another type of workflow, Hermes made more sense. But since then, Hermes has been shipping fast. Every single update has closed another part of that gap between both tools. And now, when I compare them for a normal operator, a normal founder or a creator or a beginner, the answer is much simpler.

Hermes is easier to understand, easier to set up, easier to maintain, and easier to keep using every single day. That last part matters the most. The best AI agent is not the one with the longest feature list. It is the one you actually use every day. If someone asked me today, "Which one should I install first?" I'm starting to recommend Hermes. Not because open claw is useless by any means, because Hermes gets people to the useful part a whole lot faster.

The beginner experience matters a lot. With open claw, I often felt like I was setting up infrastructure before I could get to the actual workflow. With Hermes, the path feels a lot more natural. You install it, you connect the channels you care about, you talk to it from Telegram, you create crons, you add memory, you create profiles, you start building workflows. It feels less like a side project and more like an operating layer.

I mean, it has a lot of the things open claw has, granted, but it just does them faster and more reliably every time. This is the the biggest reason. And I mean it, the biggest reason I switched. Open Claw became too much set up and too much maintenance for my personal workflow. There were countless times where I asked Open Claw to update something, create something, or modify a cron, and it just broke itself. Then I had to open the terminal, open Claw's code, inspect files, check logs, figure out what failed, and ask another AI how to fix the AI agent that was supposed to be helping me.

That is the exact opposite of leverage. The agent is supposed to reduce the number of things I have to babysit. With Hermes, that has not happened to me in the same way or at all. I'm not saying Hermes never fails. Every agent has its breaking points, but I have not had the same pattern where the system updates itself into a broken state, and I have to go into repair mode. That reliability changes your behavior. When you trust the tool more, you use it more.

And at the end of the day, what I love the most about AI agents is the fact that you can be traveling, you can be outside of your workspace, and still be productive. But what happens when your agent breaks? You have to wait to come back home, to go on your local device, to fix it. And it is offline for that entire duration. I've had periods where I have been on travel or traveling for a week or two weeks, where my Open Claw just failed, and it broke.

And guess what I used to fix it? My Hermes agent. Funny enough. The switch has not been a dramatic moment. It was a slow behavior change. I noticed I was starting to text Hermes more. I noticed I was asking it for ideas first. I I I was checking in with it every morning. I noticed I was using it for research, brainstorming, content planning, and troubleshooting. And I noticed I was not opening Open Claw unless I had a specific reason for a specific cron that I had set up months ago.

That is important to me because the real test of an AI agent is not whether you can force yourself to use it. The real test is whether it becomes the default place you go when you need work done. And Hermes became that for me. Hermes has become much more than a simple chat agent. The Kanban workflow matters. Profiles matter. Crons matter. Skills matter. The ability to run work in the background matters. Its ability to have separate agents with separate responsibilities and separate personalities matters.

If you're managing one small task, maybe none of this matters, but if you're like me and you have content, research, clients, trading ideas, YouTube scripts, XTrends, Notion, Telegram, and a dozen small workflows running at once at the same time, then it starts to feel less like a chatbot and more like a team member. And that is a massive shift. Open Claw felt like an agent, and at times it felt like a team member, but with every single Hermes updates, I'm starting to see what a team member can actually look like.

Hermes is starting to feel like an operating system, an entire operating system for agents, a whole lot more than Open Claw is. And hey, I don't want us to pretend that Open Claw is dead or that it's useless. It still has a strong community. It still has a lot of people building around it. It still has a familiar mental model if you're already deep in it. And for some people, especially people who already have a stable open claw setup, switching may not be urgent.

If your open claw works, your workflows are stable, and you do not feel pain, I would not tell you to rip everything out just because Hermes is hot right now, or Hermes is a better alternative today. That is not how operators make decisions. But if you're starting today, or if your open claw setup keeps breaking, or if you're spending more time maintaining the agent than using it, I would consider installing Hermes first.

So, here is the simple recommendation. If you are a beginner, start with Hermes. If you're an operator who wants Telegram, crons, memory, profiles, repeatable workflows, start with Hermes. If you are already using open claw and it keeps breaking, test Hermes for 1 week. Do not compare them by reading feature lists alone. Compare them by behavior and how you feel using them and talking to them. Which one do you naturally find yourself messaging?

Which one do you trust with recurring work? Which one do you avoid because you do not want to deal with maintenance? That answer is probably your answer. For me, the result is simple. My open claw thread became quiet. My Hermes thread became my default. I use Hermes to brainstorm ideas. I use Hermes to research videos. I use Hermes to manage content workflows, to schedule and run recurring jobs. And now when someone asks me what to install, I recommend Hermes.

Not because it wins every, I don't know, theoretical category, because it wins the category that matters most. I actually use it. If you're looking to install Hermes, I have a video set up on my channel. And if you want, I can also make a follow-up where I show my exact Hermes setup, the crons, the telegram workflow, the profiles, and the way I use it every morning. Comment setup if you want that. And if you're currently choosing between OpenClaw and Hermes right now, my honest answer is this.

Start with Hermes. If you enjoyed this video and would like more content like this, make sure to subscribe because I have a whole lot coming your way. And I'll be seeing you in the next video.