Why I Switched from OpenClaw to Hermes (and Why I Still Keep OpenClaw as Backup)

After months of running both agents side-by-side, here's the honest story of why Hermes won me over — and why I'm not deleting OpenClaw anytime soon.

May 2026 • Personal • 7 min read

The Frustration That Led Me Here

I'll be honest — for a long time OpenClaw was my main agent. I built a lot around it, including a side-by-side multi-agent setup on the same VPS. It was fine. Until it wasn't.

The thing that really drove me crazy was the silence. I'd kick off a task, walk away, come back twenty minutes later, and… nothing. No update. No "I'm done." No error. Just radio silence. So I'd type "give me an update" and OpenClaw would either say it finished (sometimes ten minutes ago) or I'd find out it had quietly died halfway through. 😤

That happened often enough that I stopped trusting it for anything I couldn't watch in real time. Which kind of defeats the point of having an autonomous agent.

So I started running Hermes alongside it as an experiment. The experiment ended pretty quickly.

What the X Community Has Been Saying

I'm not the only one making this jump. If you scroll through AI-agent X over the last couple of months, the same themes keep coming up from people switching to (or strongly preferring) Hermes:

• Self-improving skills. Hermes writes and updates its own skills as it works. You don't sit there hand-crafting tool wrappers — it figures out a workflow once and saves it for next time. People keep posting before/after screenshots of skills that got smarter without anyone editing them.
• Persistent memory that actually works. Way less "as I told you yesterday…" energy. It remembers preferences, environment quirks, and project conventions across sessions without being reminded.
• It just works. Fewer mystery crashes, fewer hangs, fewer "agent went to lunch" moments. Boring in the best way.
• Lower API/token costs. Almost everyone reports their bill dropping — partly from better autonomy (fewer back-and-forth turns), partly from smarter context management.
• One-shot completion. You give it a task, it actually does the whole thing, and tells you when it's done. Wild concept, I know.

Devs whose threads I keep ending up on — folks like @ai_for_success and @swyx-adjacent voices in the agent space — have all been making versions of the same point: the agents that win are the ones that close the loop without you having to chase them.

My Personal Reasons

Reliability

This is the big one. Hermes finishes tasks and tells me. If something goes sideways, it says so. I don't have to baby-sit it or poke it for updates. After months of OpenClaw's silent fails, this alone was worth the switch.

Less frustration

I genuinely don't get pissed off at my agent anymore. That sounds dumb until you've spent a year clenching your jaw at one. The skills auto-update when something breaks, the memory carries forward, and the things I told it once stay told.

Cost savings 💸

The token bill dropped noticeably. Hermes wraps up tasks in fewer turns, manages its own context better, and doesn't spin in loops the way I sometimes saw OpenClaw do. Add up a month of that and it's real money.

Better autonomy

Multi-step tasks — write the script, run it, check the output, fix the bug, push it, message me when done — Hermes handles end-to-end. I close the laptop. That used to be a fantasy.

Honest Caveats

A couple of things to be straight about, because this isn't a sales pitch:

I'm not using the hosted version at hermes-agent.nousresearch.com. Nothing against it — I just already have too many AI subscriptions and API keys floating around, and I really didn't want one more invoice in my inbox.

I've also been very happy with Venice.ai for private use. The premium models are great, but the costs do add up if you're hammering them daily the way I do.

Enter AntSeed 🐜

Here's the recent piece that actually changed things for me: AntSeed — the permissionless P2P AI inference network on Base. I'm now running Hermes through AntSeed and it's been kind of a perfect fit.

What I get out of it:

• True privacy. Requests route through peers I pin, not through some single hosted provider sitting on all my data.
• Lower cost. P2P pricing consistently undercuts what I was paying for premium hosted models.
• Full ownership. No subscription. I top up on Base, I pick the peer, I run my own agent. Nobody can flip a switch on me.

If you're curious how this is wired up, I wrote a tutorial: Connect Hermes to AntStation P2P AI Network via SSH Reverse Tunnel. Mac-specific walkthrough is here.

Why I Still Keep OpenClaw Around

This part matters, because I don't want to come off like I'm dunking on OpenClaw. I'm not. I still keep it installed, configured, and ready to go on the same VPS as Hermes.

A few reasons:

• Backup if Hermes ever goes down. Single points of failure are bad. Two agents on the same box is good insurance.
• Different strengths. OpenClaw still has its moments — certain tool integrations and workflows where it's perfectly fine.
• They actually collaborate. I had a wild experience a while back where Hermes broke part of its own setup and OpenClaw fixed it. I wrote that whole story up in Dual-Agent Mutual Aid: When Hermes Broke Itself and OpenClaw Saved the Day. Worth a read if you're curious how multi-agent setups can actually help each other instead of stepping on each other's toes.

So OpenClaw isn't dead to me — it's just been demoted from starter to relief pitcher. ⚾

So… Should You Switch?

Honestly? If you're getting frustrated with whatever agent you're using right now — silent fails, repeating yourself, watching your API bill creep up, hand-coding skills that should be automatic — try Hermes for a week. Run it side-by-side with what you have. Don't delete anything. Just see.

For me, the side-by-side test ended faster than I expected. Hermes shipped tasks. OpenClaw waited to be poked. That was kind of the whole story.

And if you want to take the privacy/cost piece all the way, pair Hermes with AntSeed and you've basically got a self-owned, self-improving agent stack with no gatekeepers in the middle. That's the setup I'm running now, and I don't see myself going back. ✨

Got questions about the setup, the migration, or how the two agents can play nicely together? Drop a comment below.