Folks,

I’m setting up Hermes Agent on my Mac with Ollama hosting a local model. But I’m on the fence on whether I should go with Hermes or OpenClaw. Hermes makes some pretty bold claims about “growing with you” and “self improvement”.

Anyone have any insight into whether it’s as good as promised?

  • FrankLaskey@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    I have only very recently set it up and I’m running it with a cloud model (Gemini 3.5 Flash) but I do think its marquee feature (learning skills based on what you ask it to do and then being able to use those in the future) is pretty valuable. I haven’t used OpenClaw but my understanding is it has a massive library of skills (essentially repeatable functions or tasks) while Hermes has a somewhat smaller library of shared skills but crucially you can teach it your own skills by just asking it to do something and giving it notes on how to do it.

    • venusaur@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      What’s the secret sauce? How it writes the skills? When it decides to do it within a conversation? Sounds like it creates skill files (markdown?) and saves them to a library, then an agent pulls in relevant skills during future prompts?

      I can see this being obsolete very soon. Couldn’t you make Codex or Code do this for you. Build your own agent/s even. Maybe it’ll be included in future releases of major commercial LLMs.

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Thanks for your reply. Yeah, that seems to be a powerful feature, specially if it’s actually able to make skills easily.

  • lefaucet@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    IMO it’s too eager to change its own code.

    On multiple occasions I’ve just asked questions like, “what checks do you do on work from delegated workers,” and it’ll decide to rewrite some of its code and break itself.

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      it just happened to me! I’ve been using telegram to chat with it all this time. Finally downloaded their desktop app and tried it out. It worked for one day and now it’s throwing a “No LLM provider configured” error for Ollama local after an update.

      I asked the telegram chat to figure this out and it’s currently reading it’s own internal code to “figure out when No LLM provider configured is called”. 😂😂

  • lunarwingorg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    hermes has some built in agent orchestration layer which seems cool on paper. never tried it. other small nice things that are unique to hermes which other agents really don’t have, which I have actually tried, include: switchable agent personalities, pretty decent thread suspension mechanism, decent webhook subscriptions, and human delay mode. The biggest thing, at least in my opinion, is certainly: Self-improving skills with patching - with an entire slew of caveats… In my opinion, this is useful but I strongly recommend using a manual review process. Otherwise, the agent has the potential to “teach itself wrong”. Human review.

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Yeah I’ve been trying for hours to get it to make a simple token counting skill. It keeps getting it wrong.

      It has webhook subscriptions? That’s cool I guess. How do you use the switchable agent personalities?

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      what’s opencode go and how is it different than opencode?

      I’ll check out the subagent reporting issue. I did run into it with Gemma-4 but Qwen3.5 and 3.6 both work well in completing tasks. Local models aren’t perfect, but they’re damn close!