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  1. Notes/

Hermes Agent initial thoughts

I had enough of OpenClaw releases breaking things I rely on, so I thought I’d take an opportunity to spin up an instance of Hermes Agent and see if it was a viable alternative.

Getting Started documentation #

Running in Docker arguably not as well thought out as OpenClaw. The documentation does cover using Hermes in Docker but I immediately ran into trouble where the first-run setup consistently crashed when I was trying to configure the behavior.

I eventually had to check out the github project and start messing with docker-compose.yml inside an agentic code editor to start diagnosing issues.

Matrix support #

Matrix support isn’t as sophisticated. I spent one and a half days solving a cross-signing issue where I saw a warning saying “Encrypted by a device not verified by its owner” on every message inside the Matrix client.

I now have a branch supporting better e2ee support that might get turned into a PR, but it was hours of debugging with Antigravity. Matrix is also very fiddly and full of footguns.

Self awareness #

Hermes does not have as much self awareness as OpenClaw. Asking questions about its own capability is an important feature for me, and I feel its absence. Ask Hermes about the location of its own SOUL.md file and it doesn’t know.

Where is your SOUL, little bot?

This was one of the unique aspects of OpenClaw that I found really impressive. The self-awareness of configuration and capabilities is wonderfully helpful when onboarding new people.

Web UI #

I find the aesthetics of the Hermes web UI to be lacking in visual polish. It has a lot of wasted space, and the font and colour choices make reading some of the more densely packed pages difficult.

Sessions are hard to parse.
The docs page needs night/day mode support.

A member of the community has made an Improved WebUI but it’s early days, and given it’s not part of the core distribution, it will be interesting to see if it’s maintained.

Conclusion #

Overall I have to say I’m a little disappointed in Hermes Agent. It isn’t the drop-in replacement I was hoping for, and while I’m going to give it a few more days to see if I can get it running how I want, I’m not sure I’ll be permanently migrating to it from OpenClaw.