Why I Switched from OpenClaw to Hermes Agent

I switched from OpenClaw to Hermes Agent because I got tired of the same failure mode happening over and over.

I would ask OpenClaw to do something, it would say something like, "Okay, I’m going to do that," and then it would never come back and tell me it was done.

That happened enough times that I stopped trusting it.

For me, that is one of the worst things an agent can do. Do not narrate intent. Close the loop. If I ask you to do something, come back and tell me when it is actually finished.

Hermes does that much better.

Hermes Agent vs OpenClaw

Hermes Actually Reports Back

This sounds basic, but it matters a lot in practice.

With Hermes, when I ask it to do something, it tends to actually come back and tell me when the task is done. It gives progress updates. It reports completion. It feels like a system that is trying to finish the job instead of just sounding helpful.

That alone made Hermes more usable for me than OpenClaw.

The other issue I had with OpenClaw was that the prompting often made it feel weirdly unhelpful. It would hesitate, avoid doing obvious things, or act like it was more interested in talking around the task than solving it.

Hermes feels more creative and more willing to actually do things.

Not reckless. Just useful.

Setup Was Easy, and I Like That It Is Just Python

I was able to get Hermes set up in about an hour.

I am using it with my OpenAI ChatGPT Pro account, and I am running gpt-5.4 as the model. During setup it initially put me on gpt-5.3-codex, because gpt-5.4 was not in the model list yet, so I had Hermes go update it manually after the fact.

That was also kind of the point.

Hermes is just a cloned Python project. You can get into the source immediately. If you want to inspect how something works, patch behavior live, or change a default, you can do it. I like that a lot more than black-box agent products where you are mostly stuck with whatever product decisions the team made.

If you needed OpenClaw for something, there is a good chance Hermes Agent can do it too, and probably better.

Migration From OpenClaw Was Helpful, But Not Perfect

Hermes has migration support for OpenClaw, which made the switch easier.

Some of it worked well. My memories and user profile moved over, which I appreciated.

But not everything came across cleanly.

I do not think my skills really moved over in a useful way, and my cron jobs definitely did not, so I had to recreate those manually. In fairness, I was not too upset about losing the old skills because I did not really like the ones I had anyway.

So I would call the migration helpful, but not complete.

Still better than rebuilding everything from scratch.

What I’m Actually Using Hermes For Right Now

I am still figuring out exactly where Hermes fits for me.

Right now I am not using it as part of my day to day coding loop. It is not replacing Claude Code or OpenCode for implementation work.

What I am using it for is more like this:

AI news roundups sent to me in Telegram
cloning and researching codebases so I can ask questions about them later
drafting things, including blog posts
web research with Firecrawl
Browserbase-powered browsing when I need more interactive web access

That is already enough to make it useful.

I like being able to message it, let it work on something, and have it come back with an answer in Telegram. That feels a lot more natural than bouncing between a bunch of disconnected tools.

The Bottom Line

I switched from OpenClaw to Hermes Agent because I wanted something that actually closes the loop.

Hermes feels more responsive, more practical, and more willing to help me get something done instead of just talking about it. It was easy to set up, easy to inspect, and flexible enough that I could make it work the way I wanted.

I am still early in figuring out all the ways I want to use it, but it is already more useful to me than OpenClaw was.

If you found this post helpful, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear your thoughts.