---
title: 'You Need to Use Hermes Right Now! (Goodbye OpenClaw!)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=QQEgIo4Juxg'
video_id: 'QQEgIo4Juxg'
date: 2026-08-05
duration_sec: 1959
---

# You Need to Use Hermes Right Now! (Goodbye OpenClaw!)

> Source: [You Need to Use Hermes Right Now! (Goodbye OpenClaw!)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=QQEgIo4Juxg)

## Summary

The video is a comprehensive tutorial on installing and using Hermes, an AI agent harness developed by Nous Research, presented as a superior alternative to OpenClaw. The host demonstrates the installation process on a VPS, configures it with Telegram, and showcases its advanced features including a self-improving skill system, memory management, and integration with smart home devices.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to Hermes** [00:00] — The host introduces Hermes as a new AI agent that is better on day 30 than day one, claiming it topped OpenClaw on OpenRouter tokens. He emphasizes its unique vibe, memory, and learning capabilities.
- **Nous Research Background** [01:31] — Hermes is developed by Nous Research, a company with a mission and purpose, not a random project. The host highlights the team's credibility and their focus on democratic AI.
- **Installation on VPS** [02:22] — The host guides through setting up a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with Ubuntu, using a coupon code 'NetworkChuck' for a discount. He emphasizes that a VPS is always on and available.
- **Quick Setup and Configuration** [05:29] — Hermes is a harness similar to OpenClaw. The host recommends using OpenRouter or LM Studio for local use, and mentions Grok as a powerful option. He sets up Telegram as the terminal backend.
- **Creating a Telegram Bot** [07:10] — The host creates a Telegram bot named 'Ron Weasley' using BotFather, gets the bot token, and configures Hermes to use it. He also gets his user ID to allow access.
- **Memory System** [09:46] — Hermes uses a memory system with USER.md and MEMORY.md files. The USER.md file has a hard limit of 1,375 characters, forcing the agent to distill important information. MEMORY.md is curated by the agent over time.
- **Honcho Integration** [14:20] — Honcho is a peer service that runs in the background, building a profile of the user over time. It makes conclusions and learns from interactions, enhancing the agent's personalization.
- **Skill System** [19:22] — Hermes has a skill system where agents can create their own skills by crystallizing successful workflows. The self-improvement loop runs in the background, improving skills and moving them through active/stale states.
- **Home Assistant Integration** [23:57] — The host demonstrates controlling smart home devices via Hermes, turning on a lamp and making it blue, and controlling automatic blinds. This shows the agent's ability to interact with the physical world.
- **Comparison with OpenClaw** [27:09] — The host explains why he switched from OpenClaw to Hermes: OpenClaw felt like a project with frequent updates breaking things, while Hermes feels more stable and polished. He also notes Hermes has feature parity but with a better philosophy.
- **Advanced Features** [29:26] — Hermes is shipping features like Kanban boards, computer use, and the ability to add multiple agents and profiles. The host mentions that Hermes can delegate tasks and ask for human input when needed.

### Conclusion

Hermes is a powerful AI agent harness that stands out due to its self-improving skill system, robust memory management, and integration capabilities. It offers a more polished and stable experience compared to OpenClaw, making it a compelling choice for AI enthusiasts and professionals.

## Transcript

The vibe, the mission, that alone sold me. you, that's gonna be better on day 30 than day agents, and I'm not the only one.
It just topped OpenClaw on the OpenRouter token It can't be that good, can it? tool, another harness?
only agent I felt comfortable enough with to I'm telling you this thing is different. that made me switch all my stuff from OpenClaw
The vibe, the memory, the fact that it learns. themed troubleshooting wizard. And also went a bit too deep, I think.
So you're gonna hear from him too. Now I'm trying so hard to not use the phrase But this, it's something special, and I don't
So get your copy ready. It's time to enter our self improvement loop. It has to do with a skill system, and it's probably
You haven't installed it yet, and that's my and it's actually pretty easy. But, hey, I get it.
Don't give me another tool. But Nous Research, the company behind Hermes, But let me hit you with number one real quick.
We're gonna install this here in a moment. This isn't some random lobster project. This is a company with a mission, a purpose.
As much as we're online, you and me are, like, our our sight and our taste and all of that We put we spend a lot of time to make sure that
And it's not just the vibe. It was just a bunch of kinda hackers on a Discord We'll hit that here in a moment, but first,
You gotta put it somewhere. It's lightweight, built in Python, but my favorite That's where I put my wife's agent.
of getting you spun up on Hermes as quickly Quick sip of coffee. Now what we're about to do here is install Hermes
I think it's actually gonna be Windows native right now will apply for anything apart from We could do the quick deploy option if you wanna
Instead, go up here to services. By the way, a VPS is a virtual private server, it's always on and always available and then
It's a whole home lab in the cloud. Do whatever you want. Test them.
Put in the coupon code NetworkChuck and watch Choose Ubuntu as your OS. You should land on the VPS dashboard, and we're
And then we'll launch our terminal. type in terminal, launch that sucker. Hermes.
not just the messaging app, and they do have all fingerprints, and then put in the root password Right now, we have remoted into or logged in
And, again, this is gonna be pretty Let's go Click on copy, get back to our terminal, paste It's gonna do its thing.
This is my favorite part of the videos, honestly. sipping coffee. algorithm today?
You gotta hack YouTube today. Now what we're about to do when this finishes is something actually I got inspired by from
They use their tools. So we actually have our agents in our Discord channels and have them running, and we talk
And there's just a Hermes agent who's like the So someone comes into our Discord and says, We're able to just talk to the Hermes agent.
having just done this, that agent has built up a huge skill set of skills particularly related I said that's what I'm doing.
I'll show you some stuff. Time for quick setup. Similar to OpenClaw, Hermes is a harness.
If you wanna go local with LM Studio, do it. OpenRouter's good, but my favorite one to start Well, because you can use your ChatGPT subscription
And without paying any more money, you can use Chuck from the future here. This Grok partnered with Hermes, and you can
Just another option, and it's pretty powerful. URL, paste that into our browser, get logged and then grab this code that Hermes gave us
Login successful. Select your terminal back end. That's a whole thing.
We're gonna go with Telegram because it's the Also noting that it has less options than you the mentality behind Nous Research and Hermes.
make the experience great with a few options. It's space to select, hit enter, and we're almost It's asking you for a Telegram bot token and
You're If not already a Telegram user, become He's gonna help us create a new bot. Mine's gonna be Ron Weasley.
every step of making Ron an IT wizard in my Give him a username, must be unique, and it That was it.
Click on copy. Hit enter, and we're almost done. Only talk to me.
Sorry. talk to our bot. So we'll find the user info bot.
him, you'll get your user ID just like this. For example, my wife's agent, Honey, I can talk We'll make our user ID the home.
If you're like, what is SystemD? run-in the background. For VPS, let's choose the system service.
Put run it as which user. It's the only user I have right now. And this machine is gonna belong to Ron.
This is not best practice or advice for any Start the service now. here in the terminal or via Telegram.
Hit enter, and Hermes is here. Hi. skills that are default built in.
At number four, foreshadowing. Let's try Telegram and make sure he also is Typing.
Now at this point, if you've never used an agent But if this isn't your first agent, if you've This feels the exact same.
But let me hit you with number two. Tokyo, and it's kind of insane. Transition.
Hermes and stay, and they may not even realize kinda do memory in the same way with a few philosophical Let me show you by building out our IT agent
Now if I say right now, who are you? I've got a nice prompt I'm gonna feed him with, Update any file, including your soul, to reflect
And then here's the massive prompt. falling in love with Muggle technology, specifically Let's see what happens.
It shows you the tool use happening. I'm going to do new, start a new session here. you?
So Hermes edited his SOUL.md file. If we cap that, here it is. Let's start building him out a bit more.
They'll also talk to other members of my team Now watch what happens here. There.
Notice we have a memory action here, and it This file, let's go open it real quick. then jump into our memories directory.
Let's cat that. what it learns about you, and it curates this here in a moment, but let's keep adding.
I'll tell him about the network and a few other So we added more to the user side. Let me tell him more about him.
He added it to his memory file. LS, there's a new file there, MEMORY.md. Notice the memory file is more about the environment,
This will also be curated by the agent. and the MEMORY.md file, they're not groundbreaking In fact, when you move from OpenClaw to Hermes,
The difference is how Hermes uses these files. files. boom, new session, the user and memory file
when you talk to your agent, it always has the Both OpenClaw and Hermes do that, but here's That OpenClaw does not do well, and you'll feel
on day 30 versus Hermes. The first thing it does is it has hard limits The user file can only be 1,375 characters.
Now why does this matter? about what's gonna be loaded into its system Ron and he was adding stuff to this memory.
things and talking and talking and talking, Well, he has to delete something. to go in there, what needs to go in there, and
It forces the agent to distill what is actually you need, and that actually matters a lot versus mostly it's gonna end up bloating itself over
It does it without you even thinking about it, I got a story for you on that here in a moment. The second thing it does is it nudges by default
Have your Hermes agent fact check me. that we've been talking about should update Most agent infrastructures, including OpenClaw,
This happens during the session with Hermes. it guards it over time. This this is crazy.
We'll do Hermes memory setup. Right now, by default, we're just using built sessions if it needs to.
kind of insane. it. in the cloud.
So here's how this works, and this is crazy. My agent's name is James, James Potter. Honcho is a peer service.
over what I'm saying, and it will start to build And it gets to know me. it will start to make more conclusions and learn.
With Honcho working in the background, when he's getting his USER.md file, his because when you're talking to whatever model
It's a blank slate unless you fill its head But then also Honcho is configured to go, what in this moment?
This combo right here, I can verify because It's kind of crazy. on the cloud.
my daily habits or that Kathy does not like show you completely, of my personality and my Like this one.
gravitates towards tool building wiring to avoid Ouch. I would get up early before everyone else, walk
I had some breakthroughs. actually plug into OpenClaw as well, but it's it is with Hermes.
even without this addition. you're relying a lot on the AI model to learn And should we allow it to do that?
Like, like, get out of the way with the models, just be figure out what it is that you want So at this point, we have our IT agent, Ron.
We're about to give him some skills. The way it does, this is so cool. But before we get there, did you know that Hermes
I was talking with Jeff, the cofounder, and internal tool that we wrote started it almost six to seven months ago as a tool we were using
self improvement for model training. kind of weird because, like, we actually already You know, when we saw what what OpenClaw did,
And, honestly, when we tried OpenClaw, it, I the other people in TMR, and they're like, this They tried OpenClaw and was like, wow.
Let's release our version to the world because reason I switched from OpenClaw to Hermes. We are a group of researchers who found each
censorship free, and democratic AI. I think who's making the tools, why they're going forward is really important for us.
wasn't just a reaction to OpenClaw, and that it was built by AI researchers, people who are Nous Research, they literally were just a bunch
own models, which was also named Hermes. But after talking with Jeff, I was even more and I'm very happy with my decision to switch
It's meant to make you be a better version of include in this video. actually gonna launch it first on the NetworkChuck
I'm showing you the basics here to get you up Link below. The most powerful thing that Hermes does, it's
Better on day 30 than day one. We're gonna make Ron powerful. does skills in the weirdest way.
Right? We're gonna use Twingate. I'll tell Ron, hey.
for access to my studio. Now I'm doing this live with you. He's gonna start working.
editor is gonna blur out my key. Now he's connected to my network. See what you can find.
That's what I've been waiting for right here. Self improvement review skill, Twingate client Ron just made his own skill.
The skill system, which is sort of like the crystallize once it's viewed how you operate to take learnings, basically, and and crystallize
that it can then reuse. you know, a crude version of how potentially, When we figure out ways that solve hard problems,
those successes. And that's a huge differentiator between OpenClaw With OpenClaw, it's all about finding skills
building skills, repeatable workflows based Now Hermes does have a built in skill library One of the, prepackaged skills that we do ship
is this, GitHub PR review, that is is in there. That skill actually is like the result of Technium having gone through thousands of PRs manually
internally for PR reviews. That's important because, I don't know if you central.
of OpenClaw skills that the community was uploading. OpenClaw had a bunch of CVEs or vulnerabilities agent related hit it yet, and I think it's because
Also, it's kind of the Hermes team philosophy, But it's not just the building of skills that's Hermes just came out with this, a thing called
runs in the background periodically, and it It'll make sure your skills are good. It'll improve skills as you're working with
It actually moves skills through an active stale created via the self improvement loop don't And by the way, the self improvement loop, this
How cool is this? And one of the things I said in that was that Computer, I couldn't tinker with it too much,
use it instead of sharpening my axe all the tweakable, it's less. and figures things out, allowing me to just
it out, kinda in that same vein. Like what Jeff said, we're kinda just getting Get get out of the way of, like, them and, like,
And and just give them the hand like, the the We just needed to give it the hands, the feet, And then once it has that haptic feedback, really,
the model of the world. He found a bunch of stuff. Now while Ron's doing that here, I'm gonna go
talk to Ron in, Telegram, start a new session Built into Hermes is a Home Assistant skill. I'll tell him to enable it first.
The Home Assistant wanted to switch on. let's see what he does. his memory.
Got that lamp behind me. See what happens. Let's say turn it on and make it blue.
places, and he's doing two different things. Yes. We have automatic blinds in there.
I wanna see if he can do this. I'm gonna go film it and see if that happens. Here we go.
What happened? There's one in the kitchen. He found it.
Back on the network side, Ron is wanting some Let's see what happens. the Hermes team, from Jeff.
exactly all the skills or I know exactly all Like, like, get out of the way of the models, just be figure out what it is that you want
IT admin with skills that I created and everything. You need to manage this thing. And he'll figure it out.
Yes. I'm getting you UniFi creds now while you're I don't know why I capitalized your, research
So you are ready to go. world, but it can delegate tasks. I'm just honing in on the main things that make
Also notice you can, interrupt, steer, or queue it would interrupt him and go, oh, oh, oh, what Instead, I'll just queue and say here is your
Alright. and password, but self improvement. Now we'll come back to this.
Well, we gotta move on to number five. And this one is just funny because it goes back Jeff's team said it themselves.
And that was my experience. oh, this is so cool. But I don't know about you, but over time, it
An update would break it, or it just wouldn't It became super frustrating, and it wasn't a It was one of those things where you had to
it because it was a project. It feels like a project, whereas Hermes feels I I I could have made a video a month ago about
I wanted to actually just see if it's cool. Nothing I didn't cause myself. her friend, Honey, who's helping her with homeschool
house for six kids. So number five, in case you didn't realize it, The team behind this, they're AI engineers,
They're not just gonna add a bunch of features And sure, it has pretty much feature parity It just doesn't allow a bunch of things that
is kinda just get out of the agent's way. Get of the way with the model. we're getting, they're good.
point, I think we would be at a point where harness, tweaking the tools around it to make I mean, things are good.
it, you really start to realize, oh my gosh. behind Hermes, I talked with the cofounder for Now beyond number five, Hermes is shipping features.
If you wanna learn how to do this, by the way, check this out. You can add more agents, more profiles, add
have one big model that does your main thinking, or one that's dedicated to delegation. Look at this.
Let them cook. released recently is Kanban. NetworkChuck.
Make it an HTML page, make it look awesome. profile, and we'll create it. You can jump into it and see the progress as
It will stop and ask for human input if it needs limit. Also, just came out their own computer use,
moving things along. Like, it's it's fun. I'm not sponsored by them, but I think they're
Hermes side by side. I convert it. I'll catch you guys next time.
If you're new here, at the end of my videos, Now I know it's a weird thing. Well, I believe in the power of prayer even
I'm not trying to force anything on you. So let's do it. God, I thank you for the person on the other
side of this camera, this screen. I thank you that they are passionate about technology, I pray that right now with the way the world
be able to calm them down, let them not be too to use, the things that will elevate them as And let them not sell their soul to AI.
Help them figure that out, God. Let their families be prosperous and blessed I pray blessings over them right now.
and I pray that through this learning, through this just tinkering, that this will produce Job opportunities, income opportunities, or
just their own thinking. for them. Thank you for letting me do that.
I'll catch you guys next time.