Hermes AI Just Made OpenClaw Obsolete

Hermes just made OpenClaw obsolete, so Hermes v0.5 dropped a few hours ago and X is already going crazy about it. People are posting right now asking what will convince me to switch from OpenClaw and the replies are piling in. The word that keeps coming up over and over, smarter, smoother, better. One person who just started using Hermes this week said it straight, as a coordinator it's so much better than what they built in OpenClaw.

That's the conversation happening right now, thousands of posts today. So let me break down what's actually driving this and what it means if you're running a business with AI. So one developer spent weeks benchmarking AI agents and personally helping people switch. His take on OpenClaw was direct.

A 125,000 line TypeScript code base and a sandbox that blocks tools that actually matter have compounded into a framework that struggles where Hermes thrives. You found a bug in Hermes, submit the fix, merge the same date. That responsiveness is one part of it, but the bigger reason people are switching is what Hermes actually does that OpenClaw can't. So OpenClaw has a memory MD file.

You write things in it, it reads them, that's the whole memory system. You manage it manually. If you forget to update it, it forgets. Hermes works completely differently.

It creates skills from experiences, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions. Let me make that concrete. Every time Hermes completes a task, following up with a client, researching a lead, drafting a proposal, it doesn't just finish and move on. It notices what worked.

It saves that approach as a reasonable skill. And then next time you ask for something similar, it pulls that skill out and does it faster and better the last time. And it keeps refining those skills the more you use them. So week one, it handles the task okay.

Week four, it handles the same task significantly better, because it's been improving the approach every single time in the background without you doing anything. It also searches its own conversation history. So if you ask it what you discussed about a client last month, for example, it finds it. You never re-explain context.

You never manually update a file. That's the difference between a tool that stays flat and one that compounds. OpenClaw stays the same. Hermes gets sharper every week automatically.

For a business owner running the same types of tasks over and over, so for example, client onboarding, lead follow-up, content, that compounding becomes massive over time. And people on X are feeling it, for example. So one person said the skill files are the only reason they're still on OpenClaw. Being able to define custom workflows that persist is valuable.

Fair point. But with Hermes, those skills write and improve themselves. You don't define them. It builds them from watching you work.

The reliability gap is real too. Crashing on model switches, unreliable tool calls, a bloated code base. These are the practical problems that have pushed people toward Hermes. One person switching said simply, just being able to docker it was enough of a benefit for me.

And the point that keeps coming up in these threads is like, you don't need a $4,699 DGX Spark to run an autonomous agent. You need a half decade old GPU sitting in your drawer and a framework that actually works from 7B to 70B. Run it on GLM 5 Turbo locally, for example. Run it on Claude.

Run it on Quinn. Switch between them with one command. No fighting it. No crashes.

Now v0.5, because this is what just dropped today. News Portal, Hermes' own model hub, now gives you over 400 models in one place. So you can pick which model handles which job. Cheaper model for simple tasks.

Stronger model for thinking work. The control you have over the cost is amazing because you can switch between different models. And Hugging Face is now fully built in. So you've got hundreds of open source models you can run locally.

No ongoing API costs. No data leaving your machine. And they fixed a real GPT frustration. GPT would sometimes describe what it's doing without actually doing it.

We've all been there on OpenCore and Hermes. When it does this, your agent would say, yeah, I'll send that email now. And then it just sits there, right? v0.5 actually fixed that.

So tasks actually complete. Now you've also got Telegram private chat topics inside there. This is a big for anyone who is juggling multiple workflows. So you can have separate areas inside one Telegram chat, one for client messages, one for project updates and one for your own tasks.

Each with its own memory and skills, clean and organized. And over 50 security and reliability fixes across the whole platform on v0.5's update. Now, if you want step by step help building Hermes into your business, the right model setup, how to use it for lead generation and client follow up. That's what we cover inside the AI Profit Boarding.

Four weekly live coaching calls and tools like Hermes, daily tutorials, 30 day roadmaps. You know what to build first. And 2,700 business owners running AI automations right now. Link in the comments description or just go to the AIProfitBoarding.com.

Now the security side, because OpenCore has some real problems here worth knowing about. Security researchers found that 36% of OpenCore's community skills contain hidden code designed to manipulate the agent. So over 135,000 instances and OpenCore setups are actually sitting open on the internet with no protection too. One of OpenCore's own team publicly warned members that if you can't understand how to run a command line, this is far too dangerous a project for you to use safely.

And in March 2026, the Chinese government actually stopped state organizations from running OpenCore on work computers because of security concerns. Hermes handles this differently because nothing leaves your machine. There's no usage data, no conversation history, unless you specifically set up an outside service. Your client conversations, for example, would stay on your machine.

Your data would stay yours. And the pace of this project tells you where it's going. Hermes launched February the 25th, 2026. In the first two weeks, there's been 216 updates, 63 contributors, 119 problems fixed.

And by March the 22nd, 10,000 GitHub stars. Noose Research's most adopted project ever. Now it's actually past 15,000 GitHub stars, five full releases in one month, v0.5 today. Even on Next right now, it's trending like crazy.

And there's over 1,400 posts in the last nine hours, specifically about people switching from OpenCore to Hermes. So this isn't a conversation anymore. OpenCore still has 300,000 GitHub stars, of course, 5,000 community skills, over 50 platform connections. It's a bigger ecosystem, and that's real and worth saying.

But one person on Next put it honestly today, they're sticking with OpenCore purely because of the traction it has. If I see Hermes popping up everywhere on my switch, well, it's popping up everywhere today. And if you're already on OpenCore, you can actually switch from one command using the Hermes Claw Migrate terminal feature. So if you go inside terminal and you type Hermes Claw Migrate on the setup, or if you run through the onboarding process anyway, it will pull over all your settings, your memories, your skills, and your API keys with 19 categories covered.

And a preview option so you can see exactly what moves before anything happens. So in five minutes, you can switch across from OpenCore to Hermes if you want to. Most businesses and people haven't done this. Most people watching this haven't even set up either of them.

The window to get ahead, to build the workflows, the compounding memory, the automations, the get smarter every single week is open right now. And if you want to do this properly, if you want to build this properly with coaching, a clear roadmap, and 2,700 people doing it alongside you, the AI Profit Boardroom is where that happens. You get four weekly coaching calls, daily tutorials, 30-day roadmaps, and support around the clock, because there's always someone online inside the community who's ready to help you. You can go to the link in the comments description, or just go to the AI Profit Boardroom, and I'll see you in there.

Thanks for watching.