Hermes Agent Might Replace OpenClaw

0:00Open Claw versus Hermes Agent, the moment we've all been waiting for. I'm going to be breaking it all down in this video. Which one is going to be right for you and which one has the competitive advantage? So, we're going to be talking about something I've been keeping my eye on and you've heard of it all about the Hermes Agent, what it does and how it's killed Open Claw supposedly. And honestly, I think every single person in the Open Claw community needs to hear and know about this because for the first time, Open Claw has a real competitor. And I'm not talking about some random GitHub project with 12 stars in 2 days. We're talking about the Hermes Agent. And I'm talking about a legit research lab with real funding, a real team, and they're coming directly for Open Claw users. So, I'm

0:47going to back it up a little bit. The company is called Nous Research. If you've been in the AI space for a while, you probably already know them. They're at the team building behind the Hermes models, Hermes 3, Nomos, and Psych. These are some of the most popular open-source models out there. So, when I tell you this isn't some hobby project, I mean it. These are the people who actually train the models that a lot of us use every single day. And they just built an agent framework called Hermes Agent. I'm heard I've heard many stories about this. I'm sure you have as well. It came out back in February when all the Open Claw hype was happening, and it kind of got lost in the sauce. But they just recently dropped a big update on March 12th, version 0.5. And I'm not

1:32going to lie, when I started looking into this thing, parts of it generally impressed me and parts of it made me go, you know, I've been over this. We've seen this in Open Claw before. I already do that in Open Claw. So, I'm going to talk about the important parts and who is for and who it's not for. So, I'm going to give you my honest take, you know, no hype and no hate either, just my honest thoughts. Um, you know, I've been running 17 agents on the Mac mini behind me running the whole content pipeline through Open Claw for the last 50 days. But what we could do is start with Hermes Agent and figure out how it compares to a typical Open Claw setup. There are some stuff in here that Open Claw doesn't have yet, and I think it's important to be right up front about that. The biggest thing is what they call self-improving skills. So, you know

2:19how in Open Claw, you install skill and it just does what it does. It's a static, you write the skill, it runs, and then that's it. Basically, you know, unless you go in and actually manually update it, that's what the skill does and that's what it's going to do. But Hermes Agent has this learning loop where the skills actually get better over time. So, as the agent uses those skills, it creates skills from its own experience and then it improves them during use, which I think is pretty cool, like genuinely innovative. I have something similar in some of my agents where they do a performance eval for my X account and for my YouTube channel. They take what's working and then apply it for the next run. Something similar, but this is nice, it's already built in. Real quick, before we keep going, if

3:04you're watching this and you want to actually build with some of these tools, not just watch videos about them, then you're going to want to check out our community down below, Shipping School. We have a full Claude code course, a full Open Claw course, and four live bootcamps every single week where we actually help you get set up from scratch. Like actually set this thing up, not just watch a tutorial and figure it out by yourself. also provide one-on-one coaching so you could book a call with me, we could share screens, and I can help you get Claude code or Open Claw running on your machine. That's it, no fluff. I built this community because watching YouTube's only gets you so far. We launched it just 3 days ago and we have over 55 members. You need people around you who

3:49are actually building, people who hold you accountable, and coaches who can help you when you get stuck. I'll put the link in the description down below. Get in now before the price goes up. I haven't seen anybody else do that in the agent space other than what Hermes is doing. So, they also have this thing called Hancho, which is like a dialectic user modeling system. What that means in normal language is the agent builds a deeper and deeper understanding of who you are and what you are trying to accomplish over time. Not just remembering what you said last Tuesday, but actually understanding your patterns, your preferences, and how you think. That's different from what most memory systems do. Here's where it gets more interesting and here's where I just kind of shouted from the rooftop, hallelujah, because they built a command

4:35called Hermes Claw migrate. So, if you're thinking about joining the Hermes team, you can literally just run this command within Open Claw and get it installed. So, they built a migration command specifically to import your Open Claw setup, your settings, your memories, your skills, all your API keys in one command and it just pulls everything over. So, they are coming for Open Claw users directly. You know, that's like opening a restaurant right next to another restaurant and putting up a sign that says, "Bring your old menu, we'll cook it better." Right? I respect the boldness, but it also tells you something more important. It tells you that Open Claw has the user base that everybody wants. I mean, have you seen what Anthropic's been shipping in the last week? It's been crazy. They're all fighting for this Open Claw movement. That's a good sign if you're

5:20an Open Claw user. So, I'm going to keep going with the wins on what Hermes does because I think it is a valuable tool and it's worth exploring for your use case. So, Hermes Agent has six execution backends. You've got local, Docker, SSH, Daytona, Singularity, and Modal. The big ones here are Daytona and Modal because they are serverless. What that means is you can run Hermes Agent on a $5 VPS and it costs you almost nothing when it's idle. Basically, hibernates. When you need it, it spins up. When you don't, it just sleeps. So, for people who are just getting started and don't want to drop a thousand dollars on a dedicated machine, that's a real advantage there. Voice mode is also built in, CLI, Telegram, Discord, and even Discord voice channels. So, you can literally talk to

6:06your agent like a normal person. Open Claw has voice through skills and plugins, but Hermes has it already baked in into the core architecture. Also, the architecture is much simpler. It's a single process. Open Claw has the gateway plus plugin structure, which is powerful, but it also means more moving parts, which has a more of a chance to break. Has your Open Claw setup broken before? That's probably why. Hermes is just one thing running. So, for new users, that's easier to wrap your head around. It's just plain and very simple. So, they also support 200 plus models through Open Router, their own Nous portal, and OpenAI, and other custom endpoints. And people on Reddit are running it with small local models like Qwen 3.5, the 4 billion model, and saying it works pretty well. So, the mo

6:52the model flexibility is there. So, this is the point you might be thinking, you know, Bo, this sounds too amazing. Why aren't you switching? And here's where I want to get into it. You know, my system already works, it runs, and it does what I want it to do. Hermes Agent currently supports one agent, just one, a single agent. So, I'm going to put that in context for you. Right now, we have 17 agents running on the Mac mini. We got Ghostface doing intel gathering at 5:00 a.m. We got Rizza writing video scripts and outlines at 6:00 a.m. Inspectah Deck is handling all things on X. U-God handles the thumbnails. Method Man clips up clips from long-form to short-form every 2 hours. The GZA does all the newsletter writing and email outreach. Ol' Dirty Bastard does the podcast outreach. Raekwon does the benchmark posts. And that's not even all of them,

7:38but you get the point. My entire pipeline, the whole Wu-Tang operation, runs on multiple agents working together on cron jobs passing their work between each other. So, I can't do that on Hermes, not today anyways. And that's the deal-breaker for me, but maybe not for you for something that you're trying to build out. So, like if you're somebody who wants a really smart agent that handles your stuff, Hermes might genuinely be the one for you. But if you're running a multi-agent operation like I am, you're going to hit that wall pretty fast and I'm not the only one that's saying this. On Reddit, in the local Llama subreddit, I have it linked down below, people are bringing this up. One user said, I'm going to paraphrase, but coming from Open Claw with multiple agents to Hermes currently and it only supports one agent. That's real feedback from your users who tried to make the

8:24switch. It's not going to work. So, if you look at the Reddit sentiment, it is mixed overall. Some people are switching and loving it. They're saying Hermes is better at executing individual tasks. The self-improving skills are winning people over, but the others are hitting that single agent wall and going back to Open Claw. So, it just depends on what you need and for your use case. So, I'm going to give you my actual honest assessment here and I want to be real because I think this community deserves honesty, not just the hype of trend surfing the Hermes Agent hype right now. Like it's going to you be good for certain use cases, but not for most people that want multi-agent orchestration. So, is Hermes Agent good? I think it is actually really good, especially if people are just starting out and finding their first AI automation. Self-improving skills, the

9:11serverless backends, the voice mode, the simpler architecture, these are all real advantages. You know, this isn't vaporware, this is built by a team that actually knows what they're doing. But should you switch from Open Claw? My honest take is no. For most of you watching this, no, not at all. The ecosystem isn't there yet. The multi-agent support isn't there yet. And if you've already got Open Claw set up and it's dialed in, you're going to lose more than you gain by switching right now. So, should you be paying attention? Absolutely. This is the first real competitor that I've seen that has the potential to actually push Open Claw to be better. If you're struggling to keep up with content, what I'm about to save you about 40 days worth of work. I built something called Content [music] Machine. It's 10 AI agents that run on the Open Claw orchestration and they

9:56handle everything. Scripts, thumbnails, X posts, blogs, outreach, clips, newsletters, all of it. So, I went from 1,000 subscribers to 4,000 subscribers on YouTube in 7 days using this exact system. Every single morning I wake [music] up and the content's already done. I spend maybe 15, 20 minutes reviewing and approving them, and I move on with my day. It works for any niche, fitness, [music] finance, real estate marketing, whatever you are building, and it is 100% completely customizable to your use case. So, you get the Mission Control dashboard, all of the cron jobs, everything I've built over the last 40 days helping me gain more and more people to subscribe and join the community. So, you plug in your own

10:42thing and it molds it to you. It learns how you talk and it writes so it doesn't sound like AI slop. $97 one-time, it's not a subscription. I'll put the link down below and you'll thank me later. And honestly, it's great for the whole community and ecosystem. Competition is how you get better and how you get better tools. So, if Hermes agent forces the Open Claw team to ship self-improving skills faster or add serverless backends or simplify the architecture, then it's all a win-win. I think about it like this, you know, when I was doing reselling on Whatnot, competition wasn't the thing that killed sellers, complacency was. The sellers who got comfortable and stopped improving, they faded out. The sellers who paid attention to what the competition was doing and adapted, they

11:28thrived. The same thing applies here, just in the e-commerce space. So, here's what I'm doing personally. I'm keeping my 17 agents set up on Open Claw. That's my operation. It works. It's dialed in. That's how I run the content pipeline for this channel, for the Shipping School community, and for everything that I do for content creation. I'm not ripping that apart for the framework that can only run one agent right now, but I am watching Hermes closely if they add multi-agent support and think in the future because that's clearly the number one piece of feedback they're getting right now, then we're going to have a real conversation. I might even run them side by side just to see what would happen. Let me know if that would make a good video. I think that would be really valuable for the community. And speaking of the community, if you're building with AI, if you're trying to figure out

12:13agents and skills and how to actually make this stuff work in your business, it's exactly why we have a community of 176 members that have joined literally in the last 17 days. We do six live calls a week, building in public, shipping together, making progress in our AI journey. We do calls all week long. We have a content call, a build lab call, a community Q&A call. We have also an Open Claw dedicated call, and we're adding a seventh call next week that's more of a technical deep dive. So, you know, if you need to be part of a community to be held accountable, you can click the link down below. We got you covered all there. We also have some courses on Open Claw and Cloud Code. If you want to come hang out, join. And as well, if you haven't subscribed to the channel, please do because we release these videos four to six times a day,

12:59and I want to cover AI breaking news. I want to cover GitHub repos that could be useful and valuable to you, as well as all things Open Claw. So, comment down below, are you using Hermes agent? What do you think? Is it just hype? If you think, you know, you're using Open Claw already, I would just not get that shiny shiny object syndrome and stick with what you're doing. That's just my two cents. We'll see you in the next video. Have a blessed night.