I'm switching to Hermes (goodbye OpenClaw!!)

TL;DR

Hermes agent beats OpenClaw with smarter memory management, auto-generated skills, and a stable product feel that doesn't break over time.

Key Points

• 1.Hermes is built by Nous Research, an open-source AI company predating OpenClaw by 6–7 months. It started as an internal tool for recursive self-improvement in model training before being released publicly, and has since topped OpenClaw on OpenRouter token usage.
• 2.The installation is a single command run on any machine, including a cloud VPS. The tutorial uses Hostinger KVM 2, configures an OpenAI/ChatGPT or Grok subscription as the brain, and connects via Telegram bot created through BotFather.
• 3.Hermes enforces hard memory limits: 1,375 characters for USER.md and 2,200 for MEMORY.md. This forces the agent to curate what matters rather than bloating context over time — a key failure mode in OpenClaw after extended use.
• 4.Hermes runs a background memory nudge every ~10 turns to update user and memory files mid-session. OpenClaw only does this at compaction or session start, making Hermes feel more alive and context-aware during long interactions.
• 5.The skill system lets the agent auto-generate reusable skills from interactions without being told to. When Ron (the IT agent) set up Twingate and explored UniFi, he spontaneously created 'Twingate client operations' and 'UniFi network operations' skills on his own.
• 6.The Curator is a new background agent that reviews, improves, and archives skills automatically. Skills move through active, stale, and archive states so the agent's skill library stays lean and relevant without manual management.
• 7.Honcho is an optional peer service that builds a persistent personality profile ('peer card') of the user across sessions. It injects contextually relevant user insight into the system prompt in real time — the author used it during a month in Tokyo with his personal agent James Potter.
• 8.Hermes is described as a product rather than a project — it hasn't broken once in a month of use. The author gave it to his wife (agent named Honey) for homeschooling, diet planning, and managing a household of six kids, something he never trusted OpenClaw to handle.