6 ms·

Migrate from OpenClaw

122 points by JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

echelon 5mo ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Did you invest in teknium's company, JumpCrisscross? Nope!
- neonstatic 5mo ago
  That's great, but did you invest in Eastern Poland?
  - gchamonlive 5mo ago
    How about Denmark before Ozempic
cassianoleal 5mo ago
It's probably good to at least be aware of the plagiarism debacle around Hermes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187581
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  Linking to the claim [1] might be stronger. [1] https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analysis https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
  - chapel 5mo ago
    Did you read it? Given it's all AI slop I wouldn't be surprised if not, but the claim is basically "I had this idea first, I think they stole it from me." 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.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > Did you read it? Not particularly. But at least that source tries to explain what happened.
      - chapel 5mo ago
        I agree on the point of linking it, which the HN thread linked before supposedly had a link to the blog post in question but it did not have any content. So thanks for sharing nonetheless.
  - nisegami 5mo ago
    [dead]
- qingcharles 5mo ago
  And this weirdness: "Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel" https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1u5ukz6/hermes_agent_and_others_default_installs_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1u5ukz6/hermes...
  - throwa356262 5mo ago
    Wow, the response from their team was really awful. 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??
    - kordlessagain 5mo ago
      I just asked Antigravity to clone the repo to look to see if it might have leaky code and it flat out refused three times in a row to even clone it. It would seem the snake is eating its own head.
  - theshrike79 5mo ago
    And already removed: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350 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.
- segmondy 5mo ago
  there is no debacle, ". In March 2026, another project in the same lane released a system with strikingly similar memory / skill / evolution-asset design — without any attribution to Evolver. " there is nothing new about memory (aka sessions saved), skills (aka prompt in a file), etc folks have been doing this for 2+ years.
  - cassianoleal 5mo ago
    I'm sorry but if this is not a debacle, then we're operating under very different premises: - 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318706
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      I have no idea what these three things mean without more context.
      - urbandw311er 5mo ago
        Looks like the complainant blogged about it here: https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analysis https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
        Catloafdev 5mo ago
        Ya I can't take them seriously after reading through that, they sound like a bunch of clowns. There was no evidence of anything other than 'this company had similar features that we offered' Boo fucking hoo. The desktop agent space converges on a small set of features that overlap. Grow the fuck up.
      - cassianoleal 5mo ago
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
  Wow, I didn't know that. I was getting impressed by Hermes but yeah, I didn't know about it so thanks for telling me. 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
- JCTheDenthog 5mo ago
  Given that LLMs are capable of generating code from open source projects verbatim (and entire books like Harry Potter verbatim) and no one gives a damn it seems like copyright is essentially a dead letter, legally speaking at least And the courts (in the US and elsewhere) haven't decided to intervene at all. Still a scummy thing to do morally though, I agree.
- echelon 5mo ago
  1. This is bad, if true. 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.
  - kordlessagain 5mo ago
    As Musk and Dorsey have said, IP law is highly incompatible with AI. 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).
    - theshrike79 5mo ago
      > 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? It was Meta. With Zuck's explicit permission.
      - Barbing 5mo ago
        & Anthropic owes $1.5b https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge-artificial-intelligence-9643064e847a5e88ef6ee8b620b3a44c https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge...
  - yencabulator 5mo ago
    > 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. Oh, no. Not at all. There won't be copyright for you. Disney will still have theirs, and so will anyone else rich enough.
__mharrison__ 5mo ago
Is it bad that I want to try Hermes but look at the code and see setup.py and no project.toml and it gives me pause?
- whilenot-dev 5mo ago
  You should be looking for a pyproject.toml: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/blob/main/pyproject.toml https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/blob/main/pypro... And a uv.lock is also there...
- _pdp_ 5mo ago
  I might be a little more paranoid than most because of my profession, but none of these projects inspire enough trust to justify being installed - let alone directly on the machine I use every day. 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.
  - urbandw311er 5mo ago
    This doesn’t get called out enough. Although actually come to think of it, I think it could be against HN guidelines to accuse things of being Astroturfed!
    - adampunk 5mo ago
      There’s also no evidence for it aside from “stars go up too much” and “my social circle isn’t talking about it”, so that could be a reason!
- __mharrison__ 5mo ago
  My bad... saw the setup.py and quickly posted.
Rooster61 5mo ago
This is specifically for migrating to Hermes from OpenClaw. The title should suggest that.
andy_xor_andrew 5mo ago
I've used Hermes Agent in a container, and it worked ok. Little rought around the edges, but that's to be expected. 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.
- theturtletalks 5mo ago
  I did the same thing. I use the Pi coding agent and they support extensions. I asked GPT 5.5 to create a Pi extension that has the magic of Hermes and for me that was the long term memory and the cron/scheduling. And that way, I can use Pi as is and turn on these using a slash command.
- chapel 5mo ago
  I've done similar, even to the point of a discord gateway integration that is very similar to the one Hermes ships with. 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.
- kordlessagain 5mo ago
  [flagged]
Multiplayer 5mo ago
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.
- needz 5mo ago
  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 5mo ago
    I wasn't trying to go point to point - my point was that its enjoyable to play with. As is Hermes!
- atemerev 5mo ago
  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/ https://lethe.gg/ (open source, written in Rust, hosted version available).
  - subscribed 5mo ago
    It's wonderful, I like it a lot, thank you, need to check on that.
  - goobatrooba 5mo ago
EGreg 5mo ago
[dead]
Zababa 5mo ago
I still don't really get the case for OpenClaw/NanoClaw/Hermes Agent/etc. I guess it's a mix of huge stacks of notes/second brain stuff but with a way to query it, and a place where all personal "AI apps" can live ; instead of making AI apps "individually" and deploying them somewhere? 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.
- fnordpiglet 5mo ago
  My struggle is despite giving it a good honest go I couldn’t find the use case for OpenClaw. Maybe I and my life is just too simple, and I’ve admittedly not invested a huge effort into spending countless hours watching breathless YouTubers vying for my attention to figure it out. I have built a few bits and bobs, I feel like I’m ideal in that I’m pretty deep into agentic workflows for work, my house is totally home assistant, I’ve got current tool following models pinned to local 4090’s, I’ve been fine tuning my smaller models, i even have a custom chatterbox based tts/sst pipeline with voice nodes everywhere. 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.
  - atraac 5mo ago
    I have the same feeling. I'm even trying to argument to myself upgrading my phone to something newer that would support AI better but I genuinely can't. The only use case I could ever need is maybe(!) using it to fill up shopping list out loud but at this point it, using shared Google Keep it's roughly the same amount of work to just type it. In professional matter though, having an AI agent on Slack, that can query readonly dbs for us, check things, debug problems reported by our users, it's pretty great.
JaceComix 5mo ago
When I dropped my Claude sub a few months ago I first went to try pi. At first I was a little overwhelmed by having to browse extensions to get the experience I want (coupled with finding new model providers to use). 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.
- alasano 5mo ago
  I understand that hermes needs to do be able to do "everything" but I can't stand how much crap comes along with 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.
- johntash 5mo ago
  what model(s) did you end up using with pi? I want to move away from claude but don't have the hardware for "good" local llms, and would rather use a ZDR api instead of one of the big apis for privacy reasons.
  - JaceComix 4mo ago
    Sorry for the late reply (relatively new to HN) After my Claude subscription ended, I tried using Fireworks and OpenRouter to be less vendor-locked and access cheaper models. MiniMax, Kimi, and Qwen were the three I tried the most since they're fairly cheap, but I still burned thorugh credits way too fast. Now I'm using Codex. I've heard that if you can deal with slower output, local LLMs can run on gaming graphics cards well enough. So they're not great for a live coding assistant, but running some tasks/agents overnight is an option.
amelius 5mo ago
OpenJaw.
isoprophlex 5mo ago
I don't get it, why not put codex/claude code/opencode in a docker container and be done with it?
- revnode 5mo ago
  openclaw = claude code + memory + cron job persistent memory plus cron job lets you do stuff that you can't do with just codex/claude code/opencode
  - nullbio 5mo ago
    Why not just use one of the hundreds of persistent memory projects with Codex CLI/Codex App? Plus Codex App has scheduled tasks too.
  - vidarh 5mo ago
    Claude at least has had memory for months, and also has scheduling now (and knows cron better than you or I, and can easily trigger itself on a schedule)
- verdverm 5mo ago
  This is what https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion does
- onel 5mo ago
  It's not really the same thing. They're different tools. Open claw is targeted more towards non-technical people.
ju571nk3n 5mo ago
[dead]
rvz 5mo ago
Other than the hosting providers, who is making money directly from OpenClaw or Hermes Agent? It only appears that the hosting providers are and not the user spending thousands of dollars on these agents.
- simonw 5mo ago
  You could ask the same question about any tool ever created. Users who figure out ways to use their agents that are profitable to them make money. Everyone else spends money.
  - swiftcoder 5mo ago
    > Users who figure out ways to use their agents that are profitable to them make money Does anyone know any of these users? Most of the agentic-coding boosters seem to be pretty much exclusively building personal knowledge bases and more agentic coding tools
jacobgold 5mo ago
What are you automating with OpenClaw in June, 2026? 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.
- ransom1538 5mo ago
  I don't understand people running OpenClaw. I just full shot a prompt to create a better clone. Its extremely custom to my work and flow. I use it as a personal agent, emails, slacks + as a hardcore coding agent. If it sees a problem in email it will create a ticket, assign it to an agent monitor progress, get a PR ready for me - then it harasses me until I review the PR. If I ignore the PR it will call my wife. It can also reason on what emails need critical attention etc.
  - jacobgold 5mo ago
    OpenClaw deserves a lot of credit for making these things more accessible and understandable to people. It really popularized the idea of async agents. But yeah, I also created a different solution that I prefer.
  - hadlock 5mo ago
    There are lots of relational databases today; MySQL, Postgres, Oracle etc. But IBM's System R established the pattern in 1974, and later IBM products SQL/DS and DB2. And of course their competitor, Oracle. OpenClaw might not have been the absolute exact first, but it did establish the pattern and is the head of the family tree of modern agents, stretching back, oh, about 7 months now. Of course there will be better architectures. Functional AI Agents deployable at home didn't exist a year ago.
  - deadbabe 5mo ago
    You can build your own, but it won’t give you social currency the way it does when you just tell people “Yea I use OpenClaw”. They already know OpenClaw and what it’s about so you instantly gain rapport vs having to explain your custom agent system that they will doubt is better than OpenClaw and probably write you off as a crank.
rob 5mo ago
Does Hermes still come bundled with a Polymarket skill enabled by default? https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-catalog https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-...
nullbio 5mo ago
I still don't understand the point of these. I use AI basically 12 hours a day, and still haven't found a use case for it that isn't solved easily with existing tools, bash scripts, cron jobs, etc. Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw? I don't need to be able to call my AI agent on the phone... That's a gimmick.
- brettcvz 5mo ago
  I set up a Hermes agent for our company and connected it to BigQuery, Stripe, Amplitude, etc so that our nontechnical teammates can ask and answer their own data questions via Slack. It works great! 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.
  - Terretta 5mo ago
    So, Cowork? Not being snarky, it seems to be Anthropic's value prop to "real" SMB is papering over Claude Code and agent protocol with a white collar business IDE. Most of these "runs on a Mac Mini!" offerings seem to be "hipper than thou" variants for the LinkedInfluencer class, while Cowork is for the workplace. There seem to be effectively zero Cowork alternatives that understand most SMB don't run on Google Workspace and Slack (or Hetzner and Telegram).
bfeynman 5mo ago
can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff? I get lost in fact that people can't really understand that end of day this is just llm calls with like sqlite facade. I see the value is the convenience only of not having to set stuff up, but everyone else claims it does all this extra stuff that is not trivial to reproduce yourself.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  > can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff? Approximately zero. Grifters, FOMO driven technophiles, and wannabe "founders" jumped on the bandwagon because it was "the next big thing" (where did I hear that before?). Now that the creator got cushy job at OpenAI, and the hype is over, it's just another tech bro toy to burn tokens with and scratch your OCD.
maxrev17 5mo ago
Yeah, everyone has built their own version of all this shit. I built smth similar which lets you delegate from say local model to Claude or mimicode to pi. It does audited, workspace segregated mcp calls with only 3 tools ever in context. It can store skills, cross harness memory, inbuilt AI first task manager. Workflows that can run on triggers or schedules which take skills, a model, a prompt and a hand picked set of mcp tools (very granular). I use this to let me know what’s going on, to save tokens in Claude by delegating to MiMo and deepseek, and local models in pi. No one using these things has a use case for them - if they did they’d have built it themselves like I have. Because with ai… you can! Oh and it can work via telegram (cos if it doesn’t is it even an ai harness token furnace!!??)
joshstrange 5mo ago
I have Hermes on my list of things to try but I've been massively underwhelmed by both NanoClaw and OpenClaw. Both of them broke on me and were maddening to try and debug. I'd get them working then 1-2 days later send a message and get no reply. I went round and round with OpenClaw (seriously, "openclaw doctor" is a sick joke) before finally nuking the VM. I want the simplest of things: Claude Code + My Obsidian Vault. That's it. I didn't even add other MCPs or Skills, I tried using Nano/OpenClaw and they both just fell over after a couple days. I'm probably best served by just vibecoding my own tool since these things try to be too many things to too many people and end up failing.
jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
I cant wait to see what the new OpenCode plugin system looks like. I'm hoping that it allows us to get somewhat in-depth with the Effect.ts underpinnings. There's so much potential here. There also needs to be some real ability to shape/drive/control the loop, where-as right now, plugins tend to be more augmentative, rather than able to contribute to steering. Those are two huge barriers, and I realize OpenCode is thought of as a coding tool, but conceptually these loop systems seem not really so far apart. The purpose of these systems is not to be a system, it's to be a platform/substrate for agency expansion. Whoever can best expose their capabilities (without having to many tattering detractors) is ultimately going to be the winner.

122 points by JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

echelon 5mo ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> Did you invest in teknium's company, JumpCrisscross? Nope!
neonstatic 5mo ago
That's great, but did you invest in Eastern Poland?
- gchamonlive 5mo ago
  How about Denmark before Ozempic

cassianoleal 5mo ago

It's probably good to at least be aware of the plagiarism debacle around Hermes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187581

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
Linking to the claim [1] might be stronger. [1] https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analysis https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
- chapel 5mo ago
  Did you read it? Given it's all AI slop I wouldn't be surprised if not, but the claim is basically "I had this idea first, I think they stole it from me." 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > Did you read it? Not particularly. But at least that source tries to explain what happened.
    - chapel 5mo ago
      I agree on the point of linking it, which the HN thread linked before supposedly had a link to the blog post in question but it did not have any content. So thanks for sharing nonetheless.
- nisegami 5mo ago
  [dead]
qingcharles 5mo ago
And this weirdness: "Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel" https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1u5ukz6/hermes_agent_and_others_default_installs_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hermesagent/comments/1u5ukz6/hermes...
- throwa356262 5mo ago
  Wow, the response from their team was really awful. 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??
  - kordlessagain 5mo ago
    I just asked Antigravity to clone the repo to look to see if it might have leaky code and it flat out refused three times in a row to even clone it. It would seem the snake is eating its own head.
- theshrike79 5mo ago
  And already removed: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350 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.
segmondy 5mo ago
there is no debacle, ". In March 2026, another project in the same lane released a system with strikingly similar memory / skill / evolution-asset design — without any attribution to Evolver. " there is nothing new about memory (aka sessions saved), skills (aka prompt in a file), etc folks have been doing this for 2+ years.
- cassianoleal 5mo ago
  I'm sorry but if this is not a debacle, then we're operating under very different premises: - 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318706
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    I have no idea what these three things mean without more context.
    - urbandw311er 5mo ago
      Looks like the complainant blogged about it here: https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analysis https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...
      - Catloafdev 5mo ago
        Ya I can't take them seriously after reading through that, they sound like a bunch of clowns. There was no evidence of anything other than 'this company had similar features that we offered' Boo fucking hoo. The desktop agent space converges on a small set of features that overlap. Grow the fuck up.
    - cassianoleal 5mo ago
Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
Wow, I didn't know that. I was getting impressed by Hermes but yeah, I didn't know about it so thanks for telling me. 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
JCTheDenthog 5mo ago
Given that LLMs are capable of generating code from open source projects verbatim (and entire books like Harry Potter verbatim) and no one gives a damn it seems like copyright is essentially a dead letter, legally speaking at least And the courts (in the US and elsewhere) haven't decided to intervene at all. Still a scummy thing to do morally though, I agree.
echelon 5mo ago
1. This is bad, if true. 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.
- kordlessagain 5mo ago
  As Musk and Dorsey have said, IP law is highly incompatible with AI. 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).
  - theshrike79 5mo ago
    > 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? It was Meta. With Zuck's explicit permission.
    - Barbing 5mo ago
      & Anthropic owes $1.5b https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge-artificial-intelligence-9643064e847a5e88ef6ee8b620b3a44c https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-authors-copyright-judge...
- yencabulator 5mo ago
  > 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. Oh, no. Not at all. There won't be copyright for you. Disney will still have theirs, and so will anyone else rich enough.

__mharrison__ 5mo ago

Is it bad that I want to try Hermes but look at the code and see setup.py and no project.toml and it gives me pause?

whilenot-dev 5mo ago
You should be looking for a pyproject.toml: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/blob/main/pyproject.toml https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/blob/main/pypro... And a uv.lock is also there...
_pdp_ 5mo ago
I might be a little more paranoid than most because of my profession, but none of these projects inspire enough trust to justify being installed - let alone directly on the machine I use every day. 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.
- urbandw311er 5mo ago
  This doesn’t get called out enough. Although actually come to think of it, I think it could be against HN guidelines to accuse things of being Astroturfed!
  - adampunk 5mo ago
    There’s also no evidence for it aside from “stars go up too much” and “my social circle isn’t talking about it”, so that could be a reason!
__mharrison__ 5mo ago
My bad... saw the setup.py and quickly posted.

Rooster61 5mo ago

This is specifically for migrating to Hermes from OpenClaw. The title should suggest that.

andy_xor_andrew 5mo ago

I've used Hermes Agent in a container, and it worked ok. Little rought around the edges, but that's to be expected. 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.

theturtletalks 5mo ago
I did the same thing. I use the Pi coding agent and they support extensions. I asked GPT 5.5 to create a Pi extension that has the magic of Hermes and for me that was the long term memory and the cron/scheduling. And that way, I can use Pi as is and turn on these using a slash command.
chapel 5mo ago
I've done similar, even to the point of a discord gateway integration that is very similar to the one Hermes ships with. 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.
kordlessagain 5mo ago
[flagged]

Multiplayer 5mo ago

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.

needz 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
  I wasn't trying to go point to point - my point was that its enjoyable to play with. As is Hermes!
atemerev 5mo ago
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/ https://lethe.gg/ (open source, written in Rust, hosted version available).
- subscribed 5mo ago
  It's wonderful, I like it a lot, thank you, need to check on that.
- goobatrooba 5mo ago

EGreg 5mo ago

[dead]

Zababa 5mo ago

I still don't really get the case for OpenClaw/NanoClaw/Hermes Agent/etc. I guess it's a mix of huge stacks of notes/second brain stuff but with a way to query it, and a place where all personal "AI apps" can live ; instead of making AI apps "individually" and deploying them somewhere? 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.

fnordpiglet 5mo ago
My struggle is despite giving it a good honest go I couldn’t find the use case for OpenClaw. Maybe I and my life is just too simple, and I’ve admittedly not invested a huge effort into spending countless hours watching breathless YouTubers vying for my attention to figure it out. I have built a few bits and bobs, I feel like I’m ideal in that I’m pretty deep into agentic workflows for work, my house is totally home assistant, I’ve got current tool following models pinned to local 4090’s, I’ve been fine tuning my smaller models, i even have a custom chatterbox based tts/sst pipeline with voice nodes everywhere. 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.
- atraac 5mo ago
  I have the same feeling. I'm even trying to argument to myself upgrading my phone to something newer that would support AI better but I genuinely can't. The only use case I could ever need is maybe(!) using it to fill up shopping list out loud but at this point it, using shared Google Keep it's roughly the same amount of work to just type it. In professional matter though, having an AI agent on Slack, that can query readonly dbs for us, check things, debug problems reported by our users, it's pretty great.

JaceComix 5mo ago

When I dropped my Claude sub a few months ago I first went to try pi. At first I was a little overwhelmed by having to browse extensions to get the experience I want (coupled with finding new model providers to use). 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.

alasano 5mo ago
I understand that hermes needs to do be able to do "everything" but I can't stand how much crap comes along with 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.
johntash 5mo ago
what model(s) did you end up using with pi? I want to move away from claude but don't have the hardware for "good" local llms, and would rather use a ZDR api instead of one of the big apis for privacy reasons.
- JaceComix 4mo ago
  Sorry for the late reply (relatively new to HN) After my Claude subscription ended, I tried using Fireworks and OpenRouter to be less vendor-locked and access cheaper models. MiniMax, Kimi, and Qwen were the three I tried the most since they're fairly cheap, but I still burned thorugh credits way too fast. Now I'm using Codex. I've heard that if you can deal with slower output, local LLMs can run on gaming graphics cards well enough. So they're not great for a live coding assistant, but running some tasks/agents overnight is an option.

amelius 5mo ago

OpenJaw.

isoprophlex 5mo ago

I don't get it, why not put codex/claude code/opencode in a docker container and be done with it?

revnode 5mo ago
openclaw = claude code + memory + cron job persistent memory plus cron job lets you do stuff that you can't do with just codex/claude code/opencode
- nullbio 5mo ago
  Why not just use one of the hundreds of persistent memory projects with Codex CLI/Codex App? Plus Codex App has scheduled tasks too.
- vidarh 5mo ago
  Claude at least has had memory for months, and also has scheduling now (and knows cron better than you or I, and can easily trigger itself on a schedule)
verdverm 5mo ago
This is what https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion does
onel 5mo ago
It's not really the same thing. They're different tools. Open claw is targeted more towards non-technical people.

ju571nk3n 5mo ago

[dead]

rvz 5mo ago

Other than the hosting providers, who is making money directly from OpenClaw or Hermes Agent? It only appears that the hosting providers are and not the user spending thousands of dollars on these agents.

simonw 5mo ago
You could ask the same question about any tool ever created. Users who figure out ways to use their agents that are profitable to them make money. Everyone else spends money.
- swiftcoder 5mo ago
  > Users who figure out ways to use their agents that are profitable to them make money Does anyone know any of these users? Most of the agentic-coding boosters seem to be pretty much exclusively building personal knowledge bases and more agentic coding tools

jacobgold 5mo ago

What are you automating with OpenClaw in June, 2026? 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.

ransom1538 5mo ago
I don't understand people running OpenClaw. I just full shot a prompt to create a better clone. Its extremely custom to my work and flow. I use it as a personal agent, emails, slacks + as a hardcore coding agent. If it sees a problem in email it will create a ticket, assign it to an agent monitor progress, get a PR ready for me - then it harasses me until I review the PR. If I ignore the PR it will call my wife. It can also reason on what emails need critical attention etc.
- jacobgold 5mo ago
  OpenClaw deserves a lot of credit for making these things more accessible and understandable to people. It really popularized the idea of async agents. But yeah, I also created a different solution that I prefer.
- hadlock 5mo ago
  There are lots of relational databases today; MySQL, Postgres, Oracle etc. But IBM's System R established the pattern in 1974, and later IBM products SQL/DS and DB2. And of course their competitor, Oracle. OpenClaw might not have been the absolute exact first, but it did establish the pattern and is the head of the family tree of modern agents, stretching back, oh, about 7 months now. Of course there will be better architectures. Functional AI Agents deployable at home didn't exist a year ago.
- deadbabe 5mo ago
  You can build your own, but it won’t give you social currency the way it does when you just tell people “Yea I use OpenClaw”. They already know OpenClaw and what it’s about so you instantly gain rapport vs having to explain your custom agent system that they will doubt is better than OpenClaw and probably write you off as a crank.

rob 5mo ago

Does Hermes still come bundled with a Polymarket skill enabled by default? https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-catalog https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/reference/skills-...

nullbio 5mo ago

I still don't understand the point of these. I use AI basically 12 hours a day, and still haven't found a use case for it that isn't solved easily with existing tools, bash scripts, cron jobs, etc. Especially with Codex App now, why do I need OpenClaw? I don't need to be able to call my AI agent on the phone... That's a gimmick.

brettcvz 5mo ago
I set up a Hermes agent for our company and connected it to BigQuery, Stripe, Amplitude, etc so that our nontechnical teammates can ask and answer their own data questions via Slack. It works great! 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.
- Terretta 5mo ago
  So, Cowork? Not being snarky, it seems to be Anthropic's value prop to "real" SMB is papering over Claude Code and agent protocol with a white collar business IDE. Most of these "runs on a Mac Mini!" offerings seem to be "hipper than thou" variants for the LinkedInfluencer class, while Cowork is for the workplace. There seem to be effectively zero Cowork alternatives that understand most SMB don't run on Google Workspace and Slack (or Hetzner and Telegram).

bfeynman 5mo ago

can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff? I get lost in fact that people can't really understand that end of day this is just llm calls with like sqlite facade. I see the value is the convenience only of not having to set stuff up, but everyone else claims it does all this extra stuff that is not trivial to reproduce yourself.

wiseowise 5mo ago
> can someone tell me the actual market size for technophiles who I think are only people who use this stuff? Approximately zero. Grifters, FOMO driven technophiles, and wannabe "founders" jumped on the bandwagon because it was "the next big thing" (where did I hear that before?). Now that the creator got cushy job at OpenAI, and the hype is over, it's just another tech bro toy to burn tokens with and scratch your OCD.

maxrev17 5mo ago

Yeah, everyone has built their own version of all this shit. I built smth similar which lets you delegate from say local model to Claude or mimicode to pi. It does audited, workspace segregated mcp calls with only 3 tools ever in context. It can store skills, cross harness memory, inbuilt AI first task manager. Workflows that can run on triggers or schedules which take skills, a model, a prompt and a hand picked set of mcp tools (very granular). I use this to let me know what’s going on, to save tokens in Claude by delegating to MiMo and deepseek, and local models in pi. No one using these things has a use case for them - if they did they’d have built it themselves like I have. Because with ai… you can! Oh and it can work via telegram (cos if it doesn’t is it even an ai harness token furnace!!??)

joshstrange 5mo ago

I have Hermes on my list of things to try but I've been massively underwhelmed by both NanoClaw and OpenClaw. Both of them broke on me and were maddening to try and debug. I'd get them working then 1-2 days later send a message and get no reply. I went round and round with OpenClaw (seriously, "openclaw doctor" is a sick joke) before finally nuking the VM. I want the simplest of things: Claude Code + My Obsidian Vault. That's it. I didn't even add other MCPs or Skills, I tried using Nano/OpenClaw and they both just fell over after a couple days. I'm probably best served by just vibecoding my own tool since these things try to be too many things to too many people and end up failing.

jauntywundrkind 5mo ago

I cant wait to see what the new OpenCode plugin system looks like. I'm hoping that it allows us to get somewhat in-depth with the Effect.ts underpinnings. There's so much potential here. There also needs to be some real ability to shape/drive/control the loop, where-as right now, plugins tend to be more augmentative, rather than able to contribute to steering. Those are two huge barriers, and I realize OpenCode is thought of as a coding tool, but conceptually these loop systems seem not really so far apart. The purpose of these systems is not to be a system, it's to be a platform/substrate for agency expansion. Whoever can best expose their capabilities (without having to many tattering detractors) is ultimately going to be the winner.