I have only very recently set it up and I’m running it with a cloud model (Gemini 3.5 Flash) but I do think its marquee feature (learning skills based on what you ask it to do and then being able to use those in the future) is pretty valuable. I haven’t used OpenClaw but my understanding is it has a massive library of skills (essentially repeatable functions or tasks) while Hermes has a somewhat smaller library of shared skills but crucially you can teach it your own skills by just asking it to do something and giving it notes on how to do it.

hermes has some built in agent orchestration layer which seems cool on paper. never tried it. other small nice things that are unique to hermes which other agents really don't have, which I have actually tried, include: switchable agent personalities, pretty decent thread suspension mechanism, decent webhook subscriptions, and human delay mode. The biggest thing, at least in my opinion, is certainly: Self-improving skills with patching - with an entire slew of caveats... In my opinion, this is useful but I strongly recommend using a manual review process. Otherwise, the agent has the potential to "teach itself wrong". Human review.

IMO it's too eager to change its own code.

On multiple occasions I've just asked questions like, "what checks do you do on work from delegated workers," and it'll decide to rewrite some of its code and break itself.