Hermes
Open-source, self-hosted AI agent from Nous Research for personal assistance and computer use.
HN commenters use it as an everyday personal assistant and homelab sysadmin agent,1234 and several say it is more stable and easier to configure than OpenClaw.567 Complaints are scattered rather than shared: one user says it gets slow as skills pile up,8 another says it is not well tuned for local models,9 and one raises trust concerns about the project.10
Why people recommend it
Personal assistant · 3
Handles everyday tasks like email, research, documents, and reminders.
“Hermes basically rules my personal life at this point - it is a _very_ useful personal assistant.”
“I am getting to know Hermes agent”
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“it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it”
Better than OpenClaw · 3
Users who switched from OpenClaw or NanoClaw call it more stable and easier to set up.
“I switched to Hermes Agent and it's been night and day how much more stable and usable it is over OpenClaw.”
“I found hermes a lot easier to use and configure.”
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“I use Hermes at home. Swapped out Openclaw for this. It seems to work better with smaller contexts”
Homelab sysadmin · 3
Manages servers, Kubernetes, Home Assistant, and routine upgrades with approval steps.
“I use Hermes at home. Swapped out Openclaw for this. It seems to work better with smaller contexts”
“I use hermes with crons and kanban for this.”
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“It's been wonderful for stuff like, say, giving Hermes an account on my Home Assistant server”
Agent orchestration · 3
Used as the coordinating agent that hands work to Codex, OpenCode, OpenClaw, or subagents.
“The brain is Hermes, OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor”
“Tron, my Hermes agent, uses agent storming to orchestrate openCode agents and hermes subagents to handle most of my daily tasks.”
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“I use it as main Hermes model that orchestrates codex/droid harnesses”
Flexible models · 3
Runs with cheap API models or local models on modest hardware.
“I am using Hermes and I did not try charts, but the rest it can do with ease.”
“It's been wonderful for stuff like, say, giving Hermes an account on my Home Assistant server”
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“I have an older laptop I run a hermes agent on”
Chat access · 3
Users reach it through Slack, Discord, Matrix, or Telegram, including from a phone.
“Right now I use hermes agent and just chat with it on Slack.”
“this week switched to Hermes”
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Caveats and dissent
Model-dependent quality · 2
Results vary with the model: cheap models hallucinate and some degraded over time.
“I recently started using the Hermes agent”
“I made it my default model in Hermes”
Gets sluggish · 1
One user says accumulated skills and overhead make it slow, and the desktop app feels unpolished.
“it tends to keep growing skills and overhead over time, to the point it is becoming utterly slow and sluggish”
Local model tuning · 1
Said to need tweaks such as trimming tools and enabling caching to work well with local models.
“you can use hermes as it offers more kind of productivity though hermes is not optimized right for local agents”
Trust concerns · 1
A security-minded commenter suspects astroturfed promotion and would not install it.
“OpenClaw, at least initially, and Hermes both appear to have been heavily astroturfed using all kinds of blackhat tactics”
Fewer features · 1
Described as polished but shallower than OpenClaw.
“Hermes is for the less technical and is more polished.”
Install issues · 1
One release stopped installing under Termux on Android.
“For general computer use mostly use Hermes.”
Often compared with
5 moved from OpenClaw to HermesPi16 comments mention both
1 moved from Hermes to PiNanoClaw5 comments mention both
3 moved from NanoClaw to Hermes
1 moved from Claude Code to Hermes
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally 4 mentions
- Migrate from OpenClaw 4 mentions
- Is anyone actually using OpenClaw? 3 mentions
- Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August 2 mentions
- Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026) 2 mentions
- Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development 2 mentions
Also written as Hermes Agent, Hermes agent, hermes-agent. Data: hermes.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 46
“I am using Hermes and I did not try charts, but the rest it can do with ease.”
“I found hermes a lot easier to use and configure.”
“I took Hermes, FluidAudio, CUA Driver, WisprKit, and OpenWispr, put it all together”
“Excited to give this a try in my local Hermes setup.”
“I've found it easier to just open up the Hermes app on my phone and just tell it to clone a project and build my features into it”
“Whether a Hermes agent with PDP-1 skills is the best setup, I am frankly not sure.”
“I use hermes on my work windows computer”
“I use it with the browser that has a great dashboard and with hermes agent and that it really makes this amazing.”
“where I use hermes harness”
“I use it as main Hermes model that orchestrates codex/droid harnesses”
“on hermes with the same agent.md, and soul.md”
“you can use hermes as it offers more kind of productivity though hermes is not optimized right for local agents”
“I also run Hermes Agent”
“I recommend trying Hermes Agent and setting it up fully”
“I made it my default model in Hermes”
“This is exactly how I want to keep working.”
“how are you differentiating yourself from something like the Hermes Agent?”
“Hermes VM doesn't even have JIT.”
“Static astro 7 site generated with Hermes and DeepSeek Flash-0731.”
“The brain is Hermes, OpenClaw from VPS is a fearless executor”
“I used nanoclaw for a bit before switching to Hermes.”
“it tends to keep growing skills and overhead over time, to the point it is becoming utterly slow and sluggish”
“2nd iteration I was indeed eyeballing Hermes which is supposed to be more structured”
“I'm running a Hermes agent as of recently on a DigitalOcean VM”
“interacting with scoped Hermes profiles”
“Daily driver for my hermes atm”
“My agent (Hermes) responds to a made-up command”
“It's been wonderful for stuff like, say, giving Hermes an account on my Home Assistant server”
“a daemon running on the host machine which can, in turn, talk to Hermes”
“Tron, my Hermes agent, uses agent storming to orchestrate openCode agents and hermes subagents to handle most of my daily tasks.”
“I use Hermes as a general agent, non-coding agent, for everything that's not strictly coding.”
“I use Hermes locally and you can't get around any of that”
“I am getting to know Hermes agent”
“Right now I use hermes agent and just chat with it on Slack.”
“I've been using V4 Flash Free with Hermes through Opencode Zen both personally and at my company and I've been having a great experience”
“How Claude Code/PI/ Hermes!! agent works”
“For general computer use mostly use Hermes.”
“I recently started using the Hermes agent”
“I have it hooked into Hermes and have been using it to help bulk rename my media folders”
“I use it mostly in Hermes and sometimes for coding.”
“OpenClaw, at least initially, and Hermes both appear to have been heavily astroturfed using all kinds of blackhat tactics”
“I use hermes with crons and kanban for this.”
“I use Hermes at home. Swapped out Openclaw for this. It seems to work better with smaller contexts”
“Hermes basically rules my personal life at this point - it is a _very_ useful personal assistant.”
“I switched to Hermes Agent and it's been night and day how much more stable and usable it is over OpenClaw.”
“it's the first one where it didn't feel like I was constantly needing to fix it”