[Multiplayer]

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.

[nlitened]

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]

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.

[needz]

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]

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

[jas8425]

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?

[hasteg]

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.

[atemerev]

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).

[subscribed]

It's wonderful, I like it a lot, thank you, need to check on that.