My simple take: Hermes is for the less technical and is more polished. OpenClaw is deeper with more capabilities.
OpenClaw has come so far since its' original launch/craze. I recommend taking a second look if you haven't touched it in a while. If for no other reason than it's just a really fun playground with a LOT of areas to experiment in. Setup a myriad of agents with various models, skills, cron jobs, etc.
The control surfaces have come a long way as well.
Hermes is good fun, running that as well but feels like they focused on polish vs features in order to capitalize on the primitive state that OpenClaw was in for its first months.
People that got attracted to the hype of openclaw but couldn't endure the fast pace of breaking changes while they figured out the problem space were well served by going to Hermes.
I get stuck when I try to post on social and my brain fills up with all the random people I know that have commented or complimented a post. The problem is there are wildly different expectations of what I post. Is anyone else dealing with this?
Lately I've decided to write for ME. What do I want to write about? That has made it a lot easier to get unstuck. That and not looking at the views, likes, etc.
fired it up via the $5 opencode go subscription and am stoked. This is an amazing amount of capability for pennies on the dollar. I'm using it alongside my codex and claude max subs. Just fantastic for coding that claude is architecting.
Big Giant Million Dollar Question: Where does having Openclaw using Claude Code via ACP fall? It's using the Claude Code harness, not the model directly.
If you are not aware, ACP creates a persistent session for steering rather than using the models directly.
Started using this earlier this week. I built a backtesting benchmark tool to compare a mix of frontier and open-source models on a fairly heavy data analysis workflow I’d been running in the cloud.
The task is basically predicting pricing and costs.
Apple’s model came out on top—best accuracy in 6 out of 10 cases in the backtest. That surprised me.
It also looks like it might be fast enough to take over the whole job. If I ran this on Sonnet, we’re talking thousands per month. With DeepSeek, it’s more like hundreds.
So far, the other local models I’ve tried on my 64GB M4 Max Studio haven’t been viable - either far too slow or not accurate enough. That said, I haven’t tested a huge range yet.
this is great! Incredibly fast and is working pretty well running loads on my m4 max studio.
Weirdly though I'm getting things like this: Apple FM is fast and free but has a hard limitation — it can't process prompts with
Spanish/non-English words, which is a dealbreaker for California and Southwest real estate where half the street names are Spanish.
I've read this and the replies and I don't understand - but want to. I have 6 agents spun up under one openclaw. 4 of them use my claude code max sub. 2 use my codex sub. I am not needing to use any metered API calls. Why are you?
Sure, single-handedly is doing a lot of work here. :) Anecdotally a fair number of people I know have referenced his thoughts so I just ran with that. Most people seem to kind of equivocate about whatever model they like, Peter on the other hand is very strident about it.
He's been on a number of podcasts - lex recently, and is really emphatic about Codex as the breakthrough solution he relies on. I just looked and on the handful of podcasts there are about 2,000,000 views this past week and half or so.
Potentially amazing opportunity for OpenAI to more meaningfully compete with Claude Code at the developer and hobbyist level. Based on vibes it sure seemed like Claude Code / Opus 4.6 was running away with developer mindshare.
Peter single handedly got many of us taking Codex more seriously, at least that's my impression from the conversations I had. Openclaw has gotten more attention over the past 2 weeks than anything else I can think of.
Depending on how this goes, this could be to OpenAI what Instagram was to Facebook. FB bought Instagram for $1 billion and now estimated to be worth 100's of billies.
Total speculation based on just about zero information. :)