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you need to use Hermes RIGHT NOW!! (goodbye OpenClaw!!)

NetworkChuck makes the case for switching from the OpenClaw agent harness to Hermes, the agent from Nous Research, and walks through installing it on a Hostinger cloud VPS wired to ChatGPT Codex and Telegram. He builds a Hogwarts themed IT agent named Ron Weasley, then shows the five reasons he switched: the vibe, the memory system with hard caps that force curation, the people and story behind the tool, agents that write their own skills via a self improvement loop, and the fact that it just does not break. Live demos have the agent learn the network over Twingate, control a Home Assistant studio, and manage UniFi, crystallizing its own skills as it goes. Cofounder Jeffrey Quesnelle joins to explain the philosophy: give the model hands and get out of its way.

Published May 20, 2026 32:39 video 27 min read Added Jun 16, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

NetworkChuck has been quietly running Hermes, the agent harness from Nous Research, for a month, and this video is the case he builds for switching off OpenClaw and onto it. Hermes is now the fastest growing GitHub project and just passed OpenClaw on OpenRouter token usage, so the real question is whether it is worth diving into yet another harness. The answer he lands on is yes, and he gives five reasons: the vibe, the memory, the people behind it, the way it writes its own skills, and the simple fact that it does not break. Along the way he installs Hermes on a Hostinger cloud VPS, wires it to ChatGPT and Telegram, and builds a Hogwarts themed IT agent named Ron Weasley who learns the network, controls a Home Assistant studio, and crystallizes his own troubleshooting skills. He also interviews cofounder Jeffrey Quesnelle, so the philosophy comes straight from the source: give the model hands and then get out of its way.

This page rebuilds the whole tutorial in order, every command, every menu choice, every demo, so you can stand up the same agent without watching first.

Number one: the vibe, and why that is not a joke

Chuck opens with the part most tutorials skip. Before a single command, he tells you to just sit and look at the Hermes site. The pitch is unapologetic: how can you not try this for the vibes alone. His point is that the look and feel are a signal, not decoration. This is not a random weekend project. It is a company with a mission, and the surface tells you that the people behind it care.

He puts the question to cofounder Jeffrey Quesnelle, who frames it as identity rather than marketing. As much as the team lives online, terminally online in his words, they are also creatures of the physical world, and their sight and taste are part of who they are, so they spend real time making sure the vibe carries through. And that vibe traces straight back to the origin story: a bunch of hackers on a Discord trying to figure out if they could build open source AI. That history is reason number three later, but the vibe is where Chuck wants you to start, because in his telling the feel of a tool is a proxy for the intent behind it.

The model (brain) Codex / Grok / local Hermes harness hands, feet, fingers Memory USER.md · MEMORY.md Skills self written · curated Gateways terminal · Telegram The world network · home · cloud
Figure 1. What Hermes actually is. The model is a blank brain. Hermes is the harness that gives it hands: persistent memory files, a skill system it writes itself, messaging gateways, and access to the world it operates on. Swap the brain (Codex, Grok, or a local model) and the rest stays the same.

Where to run it: a Hostinger VPS

Hermes installs with a single command, and Chuck stresses you can run it almost anywhere, because it is lightweight and built in Python. He mentions a Windows native version is coming. His preferred home for it is the cloud, on a Hostinger VPS, which is also where he parked his wife's agent and where this tutorial deploys. The sponsor link is hostinger.com/NetworkChuckHermes, and the only Hostinger specific steps are the ones below. Everything after the install command applies anywhere.

The setup, step by step:

  1. Skip the quick deploy option. Go to Services, then VPS hosting. A VPS is a virtual private server, a computer somewhere else that is always on.
  2. Choose the KVM 2 plan. Chuck calls it a whole home lab in the cloud: enough to run Hermes, OpenClaw, and Docker at once, and yes, you can run Hermes and OpenClaw side by side to compare them.
  3. At checkout, apply the coupon code NetworkChuck.
  4. Choose Ubuntu as the operating system, finish the steps, and wait for the VPS to provision.
  5. On the VPS dashboard, copy the SSH command it gives you.

Now open a terminal (search your OS for "terminal" and launch it). Chuck notes a bonus reason he likes Hermes: it makes the terminal itself fun, not just the messaging app. Paste the SSH command, type yes to accept the host fingerprint, and enter the root password you set earlier. You are now logged into the cloud machine, and this is where Hermes goes.

# from your VPS dashboard, something like:
ssh root@<your-vps-ip>
# type "yes" to accept the fingerprint, then enter your root password

Back on the Hermes site, grab the one line install command, copy it, paste it into the terminal, and run it. Then take a coffee break while it scrolls, which Chuck calls his favorite part of any video, watching the install crawl by while you sip. The install builds out the agent in Python; when it finishes you move straight into setup.

Choosing the brain: model, terminal, messaging

Setup begins by choosing the inference model, the brain. Like OpenClaw, Hermes is a harness, a set of tools that drives whatever LLM you point it at. Your options:

Pick Codex. Hermes prints a URL. Copy it, paste it into your browser, log into your ChatGPT or OpenAI account, then copy the code Hermes shows you back into the terminal and click continue. Login successful. Then:

On messaging, Chuck picks Telegram because it is the easiest, and he notes in passing that Hermes deliberately offers fewer messaging options than OpenClaw. That is the Nous Research mentality showing up: rather than support everything, make a few options great. Space to select Telegram, enter, and continue.

DecisionHermes setup promptChuck's pick in this build
Where to runanywhere (Python, lightweight)Hostinger KVM 2 VPS, Ubuntu
The brainlocal / OpenRouter / Codex / GrokOpenAI Codex on a ChatGPT sub
Modelyour chosen provider's lineupGPT-5.5 (the smartest listed)
Terminal back endlocal / remotelocal for now
MessagingTelegram and a few othersTelegram (easiest)
Gateway runtimelaptop default / system servicesystemd service (VPS)
Run as userany userroot (cloud only, not best practice)
Figure 2. Every choice the Hermes installer asks for, with the path Chuck takes in this tutorial. Two of these, running as root and running on a cloud VPS, he flags as fine for the demo but not general best practice.

Creating the Telegram bot

The Telegram step is short. Hermes asks for a bot token and points you at a Telegram account called the BotFather. If you are not on Telegram yet, become one, open the app, and search for the BotFather:

  1. Tell BotFather to create a new bot.
  2. Name it. Chuck names his Ron Weasley, his IT wizard. (The whole video is him turning Ron into the IT admin for his company.)
  3. Give it a username, which must be unique and must end in bot.
  4. BotFather hands you a token. Copy it, paste it into the Hermes terminal, and hit enter.

Next is a security gate: you tell the Hermes agent to only talk to you and ignore everyone else. To do that, Hermes needs your Telegram user ID. Talk to one more bot, the user info bot: start a chat with it and it returns your user ID. Copy that, paste it into Hermes. You can add more than one ID if you want (Chuck notes his wife's agent, Honey, can take messages from both him and his wife). Set your ID as the home and confirm.

Last, the gateway runtime. Hermes installs the messaging gateway as a systemd service. (Chuck plugs his own systemd explainer here for anyone who needs it.) Choose how it should run in the background:

Then it asks which user to run as. On this cloud box Chuck chooses root, with the caveat repeated twice that this is not best practice anywhere else; he does it because root is the only user on the fresh machine and because this machine is meant to belong to Ron, the IT admin who owns it. Start the service now. Done.

At this point you can talk to Hermes in the terminal or over Telegram. Chuck does both. In the terminal he hits enter, types "Hi", and the agent answers. At the top of the terminal session you can see all the default built in skills, which become important at number four. Over in Telegram, his new bot replies: "Hi, Chuck. What can I help you with today?" The agent is alive in two places at once.

If this is your first agent, he says, this is the magic moment, go enjoy it. But if you have used OpenClaw, you are thinking this feels identical. At first glance it is. The difference is everything that comes next.

Number two: memory, the reason people switch and stay

Chuck's claim is that memory is why people switch to Hermes and stay, even if they never put their finger on it. Under the hood, Hermes and OpenClaw store memory in similar ways, but a few philosophical differences change the whole experience. He demonstrates by building Ron's identity live.

Ask a fresh agent "who are you" and you get a generic "I'm Hermes." To change that, he feeds it a seed prompt: here is who you are going to be, update any file including your soul to reflect this going forward, followed by a long backstory making the agent Ron Weasley, a wizard following his father's footsteps into a love of Muggle technology, specifically IT. (The full backstory prompt is in the video description.)

Watch the terminal: the agent immediately uses a skill, and Hermes shows you the tool use happening, which Chuck loves. The result is "identity locked." He starts a new session, approves it, asks "who are you," and the agent answers in character. Under the hood Hermes edited its SOUL.md file. OpenClaw can do that too, so nothing magic yet.

Then he builds Ron out. He tells Ron who he is: "I'm NetworkChuck, call me Chuck," plus that Ron will talk to other team members when they have issues. A memory action fires and the detail lands in a user file. He opens it directly:

cd ~/.hermes/memories
ls          # SOUL.md, USER.md
cat USER.md

USER.md is what Hermes writes about you, curated by the agent on its own. He adds more (details about the network and a few other things), some lands in USER.md, and then a second file appears:

ls          # now also MEMORY.md
cat MEMORY.md

MEMORY.md is about the environment: where Ron is running and the technical facts of his world, also curated by the agent. Neither file is groundbreaking on its own; OpenClaw has both, and migrating from OpenClaw to Hermes is partly just carrying these files over. Both harnesses load the user and memory files into the system prompt at the start of every new session, so the agent always opens with the most relevant facts about you. The difference is what Hermes does that OpenClaw does not, and it is the reason OpenClaw feels clunky and bloated by day 30.

SOUL.md who the agent is identity, persona no hard cap USER.md what it learns about you 1,375 chars max MEMORY.md the environment where it runs 2,200 chars max all three load into the system prompt at the start of every session
Figure 3. The three memory files, and the two hard caps that make the difference. Because USER.md tops out at 1,375 characters and MEMORY.md at 2,200, the agent is forced to curate. When a file fills, it must delete something to add something, which keeps the loaded context distilled instead of bloated.

Hermes does two things OpenClaw does not do well:

Honcho: long term memory that reasons about you

Then Chuck goes further with the Hermes memory config:

hermes memory setup

By default Hermes uses the built in memory and user files plus a mechanism to search your past sessions. But the setup also exposes add ons, and he wires in one called Honcho. (He flags it could be its own video, and he is probably going to make one.) You can run a Honcho server locally or in the cloud; he ran it in the cloud.

Here is the mechanism, and it is the most interesting idea in the video. His agent here is named James (James Potter). Every message he sends to James is also sent to Honcho. Honcho is a separate peer service, not Hermes itself, a plug in that reasons over what you say and builds a peer card: a growing model of who Chuck is. As more messages flow in, Honcho draws more conclusions and learns.

The clever part is at James's end. When Chuck sends a message, James's system prompt is assembled from his USER.md and SYSTEM.md files (the brain starts blank every time, whether it is an Anthropic or GPT model, so it only knows what you load into it), and then Honcho injects an answer to a live question: what does James need to know about Chuck right now, in this moment, given what he just asked? Built in static memory plus dynamic, query aware context. Chuck says he can vouch for it because he ran exactly this setup for a month.

The Honcho peer card is unnervingly perceptive. Among the conclusions it drew about him: his daily habits, that Kathy does not like spice, and a trait it labeled "high friction technical procrastination," gravitating toward tool building and wiring to avoid high stakes communication or soul work. "Ouch." He first started using James in Tokyo, getting up early to walk the neighborhoods having conversations with the agent, and says he had real breakthroughs.

To be fair, he adds, you can plug Honcho into OpenClaw too, but it is not as good there, not as much of a first class citizen as it is in Hermes. And Hermes is great even without it.

He admits the whole thing is a little scary, because you are trusting the model to learn and self correct. Should we let it? Quesnelle's answer: the models are smart, get out of the way, they are smart enough to figure out what you want if you let them.

Number three: the people and the story

Before handing Ron any skills, Chuck drops the history. Hermes existed before OpenClaw, which surprised him too. Per Quesnelle, the Hermes agent started six to seven months earlier as an internal tool the team wrote to prototype recursive self improvement for model training. When OpenClaw launched it was strange for them, because they already had their own version. They were aware of the effect OpenClaw would have on the world, so they decided they could release theirs. And when team members tried OpenClaw, it felt clunkier than what they had internally, which is exactly why they shipped their own: they thought it was better.

This is reason number three: the people and the story. Quesnelle describes the team as researchers who found each other because they care about making humanistic, censorship free, and democratic AI. Chuck argues that in the age of AI, who makes the tools, why, and where they are headed all matter. Nous Research were a bunch of hacker nerds in a Discord training their own models, which were also called Hermes (the Hermes models still exist and are separate from the Hermes agent). After the conversation he was more convinced the company is the real thing, and happier with the switch. Quesnelle's line: AI is not meant to replace you, it is meant to make you a better version of you every day.

The full interview, Chuck notes, was too long to include, so it is launching first on the NetworkChuck Academy alongside a course they are building. This video is the get up and running basics.

Number four: agents that write their own skills

This is the headline, the "grow with you, better on day 30 than day one" reason. Time to give Ron real abilities, except Hermes does skills in the weirdest way, and watching it happen is the point.

Ron lives in the Hostinger cloud and cannot reach Chuck's studio gear yet. The bridge is Twingate, a VPN for remoting into your own stuff. Chuck tells Ron, in plain language: set up the headless Twingate client for access to my studio, here is your key, make it happen. Ron goes to work (the video editor blurs the key on screen), adds the connection to his memory, and connects to the network.

You: set up the headless Twingate client for access to my studio. Here is your key.
Ron: [installs the headless client] ... done. Saved connection to memory.

Then: "search the network, see what you can find." Ron starts searching, and the thing Chuck was waiting for appears on screen, unprompted:

Self improvement review skill, operations created.

Ron wrote his own skill. Nobody told him to. That, Chuck says, is the power of Hermes: it makes its own skills. Quesnelle describes the skill system as the heart of it, the ability to crystallize, once the agent has seen how you operate, to take learnings and compress them into a meaningful reusable chunk. The model is a crude version of how people work: we struggle through hard problems, note down what solved them, and iterate on those successes.

work a task with you struggle, then solve crystallize write a skill Curator active · stale · archive good skills feed back into the next task; stale ones get archived
Figure 4. The self improvement loop. The agent does real work with you, struggles through a hard problem, solves it, and crystallizes the solution into a reusable skill, modeled on how people learn. The Curator then runs in the background and moves skills through active, stale, and archive states so self written skills do not pile up forever.

This is the big differentiator from OpenClaw. With OpenClaw, skills come from a marketplace you shop in. With Hermes, skills are built from your actual interactions, repeatable workflows the agent distills as it works. Hermes also ships a built in skill library curated by the team. Quesnelle gives an example: the prepackaged GitHub PR review skill is the crystallized result of Technium having reviewed thousands of PRs by hand and codifying the internal review process into one high quality skill.

Chuck ties that to security. When OpenClaw launched, he calls it "malware central," with a Claude hub of community uploaded skills that contained bad stuff, and OpenClaw shipped CVEs that could get you hacked. As of this video, Hermes had not had an agent related vulnerability hit it, which he credits to the keep it simple philosophy of curating skills rather than opening a free for all marketplace.

And the loop got a new piece: the Curator, an agent that runs in the background periodically to review your skills, curate them, remove ones that are no longer relevant, and improve the ones you use. It moves skills through active, stale, and archive states so that skills created by the self improvement loop do not accumulate forever.

He calls back to his Perplexity Computer video, where the point was that because he could not tinker with it much, he was forced to just be creative and use it instead of constantly sharpening his axe. Hermes is tweakable, but less so, and it mostly just works and figures things out, which frees him to work with it rather than on it. Quesnelle's framing: get out of the way, the model is the brain, the harness gives it the hands and feet and fingers to touch the world, the haptic feedback. Weird thought, but it works.

Live demo: Home Assistant and UniFi

While Ron keeps searching the network, Chuck runs two demos at once, talking to Ron in the terminal and in Telegram simultaneously, doing two different jobs.

Home Assistant. Hermes ships a Home Assistant skill, disabled by default, that Chuck uses to run his studio. In a fresh Telegram session he tells Ron to enable it, hands over the IP address and key, and Ron figures it out and saves it to memory. The tests, one after another:

UniFi. Back on the network side, Ron wants UniFi access. This is where Chuck applies the lesson from the Hermes team directly: rather than the hubris of pre loading every skill the admin might need, you bring the agent on like a person and say "you need to manage this thing, go look at it," and it figures it out. He starts getting Ron UniFi credentials and tells him to research everything he can about UniFi so he is ready.

He notes these capabilities are not new to the agent world (task delegation, sub agents, a fully functional harness), he is just highlighting what makes Hermes good. You can also interrupt, steer, or queue messages. By default a new message interrupts the agent ("what does Chuck need?"), so instead he queues: "here is your UniFi API key." Ron finishes his inventory, realizes he cannot get far without a username and password, and self improves again, creating a UniFi network operation skill. Chuck gives him a user account and leaves it running to see how far he gets.

Number five: it just does not break

Reason five is the simplest and, in his telling, the most important. OpenClaw was clunky, the Hermes team said so themselves, and that was his experience too. He set up OpenClaw, loved how powerful it felt, and then over time it degraded: an update would break it, or it just would not respond, and he would be typing "hey, are you there, are you awake." It became frustrating, and it was not something he wanted to hand to his wife or family, because you had to be an IT person who knew how to troubleshoot it. OpenClaw feels like a project. Hermes feels like a product.

A month of use and he says he has not had a single issue he did not cause himself. His wife is happily talking to her agent, Honey, who helps with homeschooling, diet planning, and managing the house for their six daughters. Number five is just that Hermes does not break.

He credits the team being AI engineers and their mentality: they are not going to bolt on features to bloat it or to chase a competitor. It has roughly feature parity with OpenClaw, it just leaves out the things that should not be there. Quesnelle's view, which Chuck plays here: get out of the way of the model. The models are good enough now that if new models stopped today we would still be near AGI; what matters most is the right harness and tweaking the tools around the model. With models like Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 already this good, pairing them with something like Hermes is where you realize how much more you can do.

Beyond five: dashboard, Kanban, computer use

Hermes keeps shipping. Chuck shows the Hermes dashboard, where you can:

The most powerful recent addition is Kanban. You create a task, say "make me a Pokemon card for NetworkChuck, use my likeness, build it as an awesome HTML page," assign it to a profile (default), and create it. You can open the card to watch progress, add comments, and the agent will stop and ask for human input when it needs it. In the demo it got blocked because he hit his usage rate limit, but the workflow is clear. Hermes also just shipped its own computer use, still in preview, letting the agent control your computer.

Chuck closes honestly: he is a bit of a fanboy, he likes the vibe and the people, he is not sponsored by Nous Research, he just thinks they are cool. His ask: try Hermes, run it alongside OpenClaw, do the migration, run your own test, and tell him in the comments whether you converted.

The video ends with his signature prayer for the audience, a blessing over their families and work, and a specific line for this moment in AI: that they would not sell their soul to AI or offload the things they themselves need to do, but use it to elevate and encourage them as humans.

Key takeaways

Chapters

Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the player jumps there and keeps playing while you read.

Notable quotes

I'm switching to Hermes. The vibe, the mission, that alone sold me. But the idea that the Hermes agent grows with you, that's gonna be better on day 30 than day one. That got me hooked. NetworkChuck, 0:00

It's the only agent I felt comfortable enough with to give to my wife. She calls hers honey. It's her BFF. NetworkChuck, 0:25

As much as we're online, you and me are like terminally online, we're also creatures of this world, and our sight and our taste are part of who we are. Jeffrey Quesnelle, 1:40

The user file can only be 1,375 characters. The memory file, 2,200 characters. It forces the agent to distill what is actually important about interacting with you. NetworkChuck, 12:51

Trait: high friction technical procrastination, gravitates towards tool building, wiring to avoid high stakes communication or soul work. Ouch. NetworkChuck reading his Honcho peer card, 16:30

The models are smart. Get out of the way with the models, basically. They're smart enough, if we let them, to just figure out what it is that you want to do. Jeffrey Quesnelle, 17:00

Self improvement review skill, operations created. Ron just made his own skill. That's the power of Hermes. NetworkChuck, 19:55

The model is the brain. We just needed to give it the hands, the feet, the fingers to touch the world. The harness is the haptic feedback to the model of the world. Jeffrey Quesnelle, 23:30

OpenClaw feels like a project, whereas Hermes feels more like a product. NetworkChuck, 26:40

If we stopped getting new models at this point, I think we would be at a point where we could have AGI. What matters most now is using the right harness. Jeffrey Quesnelle, 27:30

AI is not meant to replace you. It's meant to make you a better version of you every day. Jeffrey Quesnelle, 18:40

Resources mentioned

Full transcript
I'm switching to Hermes. The vibe, the mission, that alone sold me. But the idea that the Hermes agent grows with you, that's gonna be better on day 30 than day one. That got me hooked. Also because I'm tired of fixing my OpenClaw agents, and I'm not the only one. This is now the fastest growing GitHub project. It just topped OpenClaw on the OpenRouter token usage. This thing's taken the world by storm. It can't be that good, can it? Is it actually worth diving into yet another tool, another harness? Let's talk about it. I've been using it for a month, and it's the only agent I felt comfortable enough with to give to my wife. She calls hers honey. It's her BFF. I'm telling you this thing is different. Let me show you the five things, the five reasons that made me switch all my stuff from OpenClaw to Hermes. Actually, here's a teaser. The vibe, the memory, the fact that it learns. Also, we're gonna build our very own IT Hogwarts themed troubleshooting wizard. Easy for me to say. It's literally magic. And also went a bit too deep, I think. I ended up talking to one of the cofounders, Jeffrey Quesnelle. So you're gonna hear from him too. Now I'm trying so hard to not use the phrase right now because I told you I would chill out on that this year. But this, it's something special, and I don't want you burning tokens on tools that will frustrate you. This one's worth your time. So get your copy ready. It's time to enter our self improvement loop. Self improvement loop. What does that mean? That's number four. It has to do with a skill system, and it's probably the best reason on this list. But hold on. Don't go there yet. You haven't installed it yet, and that's my goal with this video. You're gonna walk away with Hermes running, and it's actually pretty easy. They even have an OpenClaw migration path. How nice of them. But, hey, I get it. You might be where I was about a month ago. AI tool fatigue. Don't give me another tool. I'm full. Get it away from me. But Nous Research, the company behind Hermes, told me to try it, and I said, fine. But let me hit you with number one real quick. Look at this site. How can you not try this for the vibes alone? We're gonna install this here in a moment. Don't worry. But just sit here and appreciate this. This isn't some random lobster project. Wee. This is a company with a mission, a purpose. I asked Jeff, one of the cofounders, what's up with this? [Jeff] As much as we're online, you and me are, like, terminally online. We're also, like, creatures of this world, and our sight and our taste and all of that are part of who we are. We put we spend a lot of time to make sure that we have that vibe feel behind it. And it's not just the vibe. It's who these people are. That was our origin story. It was just a bunch of kinda hackers on a Discord trying to figure out if we can make open source AI. We'll hit that here in a moment, but first, we gotta install this. To install it, we just run this one command. But where? You gotta put it somewhere. Thankfully, you can pretty much run this anywhere. It's lightweight, built in Python, but my favorite place to run this sucker is in the cloud. Hostinger. That's where I put my wife's agent. They are the sponsor of this video and the sponsor of getting you spun up on Hermes as quickly as possible. Are you ready? Quick sip of coffee. Go out to Hostinger.com/NetworkChuckHermes. Now what we're about to do here is install Hermes on a computer and the cloud. But again, you can install it anywhere. I think it's actually gonna be Windows native here soon. And don't worry, the tutorial I'm showing you right now will apply for anything apart from the Hostinger stuff. But here we are in Hostinger. We could do the quick deploy option if you wanna be really fast, but I prefer this method. Don't click on that. Instead, go up here to services. Click on VPS hosting right here. By the way, a VPS is a virtual private server, fancy talk for computer somewhere else, but it's always on and always available and then always awesome. We'll choose our plan. KVM two is the choice. It's a whole home lab in the cloud. Run Hermes. Run OpenClaw. Run Docker. I don't care. Do whatever you want. It can handle it. And, yes, you can run Hermes and OpenClaw side by side. Test them. Once you choose your plan, and watch this. Put in the coupon code NetworkChuck and watch magic happen. Boom. It worked. Choose Ubuntu as your OS. Go through a few more steps and then wait for your VPS to brew. You should land on the VPS dashboard, and we're gonna copy this command right here. Copy. And then we'll launch our terminal. Whatever OS you have, go to your search bar, type in terminal, launch that sucker. Oh, yeah. Best place to be. That's actually one of the things I love about Hermes. This is a bonus one. Is they actually do make it fun in the terminal, not just the messaging app, and they do have that too. We'll paste our command, type yes to accept all fingerprints, and then put in the root password that you set up earlier, and we're in. Right now, we have remoted into or logged in to a computer in the cloud, and this is where we're going to install Hermes. And, again, this is gonna be pretty. Let's go out to Hermes and grab that one line command I talked about. There it is. Click on copy, get back to our terminal, paste that in, and go. It's gonna do its thing. Coffee break. This is my favorite part of the videos, honestly. Watching stuff scroll across the terminal while sipping coffee. It's therapy. Hey. While you're waiting, have you hacked the YouTube algorithm today? Let's make sure you do. Hit that like button, subscribe, notification bell, comment. You gotta hack YouTube today. Ethically, of course. Now what we're about to do when this finishes up is we're gonna create our IT agent, and this is something actually I got inspired by from Jeff over at Nous Research. They get a dog food mentality over there. They use their tools. And I asked him, like, how do you use it? [Jeff] He's like, this example. So we actually have our agents in our Discord channels and have them running, and we talk to them like they're team members, basically. And there's just a Hermes agent who's like the system admin. So someone comes into our Discord and says, oh, something this happened. I got this error message. We're able to just talk to the Hermes agent. And what's really amazing is that through having just done this, that agent has built up a huge skill set of skills particularly related to debugging our infrastructure. When he told me that, my brain exploded, and I said that's what I'm doing. We'll talk more about their example later. I'll show you some stuff. Now the vibe. Come on. That was cool. Okay. We're here. Time for quick setup. Hit enter. The first step is choosing our inference model or the brain. Similar to OpenClaw, Hermes is a harness. It's a set of tools that would use whatever LLM you want. If you wanna go local with LM Studio, do it. Hermes is really good with it, especially the Qwen model. Wanna go Frontier? OpenRouter's good, but my favorite one to start with is the OpenAI Codex. Why? Well, because you can use your ChatGPT subscription with this. Most of us already pay for ChatGPT. And without paying any more money, you can use ChatGPT as the brain for Hermes. Chuck from the future here. Something epic just happened. This Grok partnered with Hermes, and you can use this as a user Grok subscription with Hermes. Just another option, and it's pretty powerful. Let's try it out. Hit enter, and all we gotta do is copy this URL, paste that into our browser, get logged into our ChatGPT account or OpenAI account, and then grab this code that Hermes gave us and paste that in here. Click continue, and that was it. Pretty hard. Login successful. Then we'll choose our model. GPT-5.5. It's the smartest. Select your terminal back end. Keep it local for now. We'll just know you can run it remotely. That's a whole thing. Then finally, set up messaging. Let's go ahead and do that. Here you have options. We're gonna go with Telegram because it's the easiest, but you can do any one of these. Also noting that it has less options than you would see with OpenClaw. You'll start to see this develop as kind of the mentality behind Nous Research and Hermes. Instead of supporting everything, they'd rather make the experience great with a few options. And, obviously, this is more than a few. Let's go Telegram. It's space to select, hit enter, and we're almost there. This part actually is really easy. It's asking you for a Telegram bot token and to talk to somebody named the bot father. If not already a Telegram user, become one and open up Telegram. Search for the bot father. He's gonna help us create a new bot. Open. Click on create a new bot, and let's name our bot. Mine's gonna be Ron Weasley. That's my IT wizard. By the way, you're gonna watch me walk through every step of making Ron an IT wizard in my company. Legit. Give him a username, must be unique, and it must end in bot. Nailed it. Create bot. That was it. Now that little pixie dust thing, we're gonna copy that. Click on copy. That's your token. Paste that right here in the terminal. Hit enter, and we're almost done. This is a security measure where you can tell your Hermes agent, hey. Only talk to me. Don't talk to anybody else. Ignore everyone else. I'm the user now. Sorry. That was lame. We're gonna go with it. We're gonna talk to one more bot before we can talk to our bot. The user info bot, we need our username from Telegram. So we'll find the user info bot. And, usually, when you just start talking to him, you'll get your user ID just like this. Copy that. Paste it. If you wanna add more, you can. For example, my wife's agent, Honey, I can talk to her as well, not just my wife. We'll make our user ID the home. Just hit yes. We'll install the gateway as a SystemD service. If you're like, what is SystemD? I got a video on that right here. Just hit yes for how the gateway service should run in the background. If you're on a laptop, go with the default option. For VPS, let's choose the system service. So I'm gonna go with don't get mad at me in the comments. Put run it as which user. I'm gonna put root. I'm on a cloud machine. It's the only user I have right now. It's who I am right now. And this machine is gonna belong to Ron. I want him to own it. He is the IT admin anyway. This is not best practice or advice for any other setup. For our example, it's fine. Start the service now. Yep. And we're kinda done. And at this point, we could talk to Hermes right here in the terminal or via Telegram. Let's do it in the terminal. It's cooler. Hit enter, and Hermes is here. Let's see if he is here. Hi. He's alive. Also notice at the top here, all the available skills that are default built in. Talk about that here in a moment. At number four, foreshadowing. Let's try Telegram and make sure he also is alive there. We'll talk to our new user. Typing. Hi, Chuck. What can I help you with today? Now at this point, if you've never used an agent before, this is magic. Right? Enjoy. Go crazy. But if this isn't your first agent, if you've already used OpenClaw, you're probably going, Chuck, how's this different? This feels the exact same. And, honestly, at first glance, it kind of is. But let me hit you with number two. I discovered this while walking the street to Tokyo, and it's kind of insane. I think memory is the reason people switch to Hermes and stay, and they may not even realize that's the reason. Because under the hood, Hermes and OpenClaw kinda do memory in the same way with a few philosophical differences, and they make all the differences in the world. Let me show you by building out our IT agent right now. So remember, this is gonna be Ron. Now if I say right now, who are you? It's gonna be generic. I'm Hermes. Let's change that. I've got a nice prompt I'm gonna feed him with, seed him with. Here is who you are going to be. Update any file, including your soul, to reflect this going forward. And then here's the massive prompt. Essentially, he's Ron Weasley. He's following in his father's footsteps of falling in love with Muggle technology, specifically IT. Yada yada yada. It's a backstory you can see in the description below. Let's see what happens. Now notice it's already using a skill. This is actually something I love about it. It shows you the tool use happening. Identity locked. Let's test it. I'm going to do new, start a new session here. We will approve that, and I'll say, who are you? This is gonna be fun. So Hermes edited his SOUL.md file. Big deal. OpenClaw can do that. If we cat that, here it is. Still nothing amazing yet, but hold on. Let's start building him out a bit more. I'll tell him who I am. I'm NetworkChuck and call me Chuck. They'll also talk to other members of my team when they have issues, blah blah blah. Let's tell him that. Now watch what happens here. I think it's gonna happen here. I'm doing this live with you. There. Notice we have a memory action here, and it added it to my user file. This file, let's go open it real quick. We'll cd into our dot Hermes directory and then jump into our memories directory. Well, ls there, and there it is. USER.md. Let's cat that. This file is what Hermes will write about you, what it learns about you, and it curates this on its own. And that's a key part. We're gonna cover why that's important here in a moment, but let's keep adding. This is fun. I'll give him some more information. I'll tell him about the network and a few other things. With that information, let's see what happens. So we added more to the user side. Let me tell him more about him. Ah, and there's the other part of the memory. He added it to his memory file. Let's go look at that. LS, there's a new file there, MEMORY.md. Notice the memory file is more about the environment, where Ron is running, some technical things. This will also be curated by the agent. Now those two things, the USER.md file and the MEMORY.md file, they're not groundbreaking. Like, OpenClaw has these too. In fact, when you move from OpenClaw to Hermes, that's part of migration is just taking those files over to Hermes. The difference is how Hermes uses these files. Now both Hermes and OpenClaw will take these files. And when you start a new session with Hermes, boom, new session, the user and memory file will be loaded into the system prompt so that when you talk to your agent, it always has the most relevant information about you and what you're doing. Both OpenClaw and Hermes do that, but here's what Hermes does that OpenClaw does not do well, and you'll feel this. And this is why OpenClaw feels clunky and bloated on day 30 versus Hermes. Actually, Hermes does two things. The first thing it does is it has hard limits on the size of those files. The user file can only be 1,375 characters. The memory file, 2,200 characters. Now why does this matter? Well, it forces the agent to be very particular about what's gonna be loaded into its system prompt. Now, for example, we were just talking with Ron and he was adding stuff to this memory. And as we keep talking to him and adding more things and talking and talking and talking, that's gonna get full. So what happens when it gets full? Well, he has to delete something. He has to curate it, guard what actually needs to go in there, and that keeps the agent focused. It forces the agent to distill what is actually important about interacting with you and what you need, and that actually matters a lot versus OpenClaw, does have similar mechanisms, but mostly it's gonna end up bloating itself over time if you don't really watch it. This does it by default. It does it without you even thinking about it, and it did it when I didn't even realize it was doing it. I got a story for you on that here in a moment. This is my wow moment with Hermes. The second thing it does is it nudges by default every 10 turns. I believe it's every 10 turns. Have your Hermes agent fact check me. It will run a background agent to see if anything that we've been talking about should update the memory or user file. Most agent infrastructures, including OpenClaw, only do this when you're about to compact or start a new session. This happens during the session with Hermes. It's more active. This alone made it feel pretty different, and it guards it over time. But then I tried something else. Watch this. This is crazy. I tried this. We'll use the Hermes command line options. We'll do Hermes memory setup. Here, can configure the Hermes memory. Right now, by default, we're just using built in memory and user. It also has a mechanism to search your past sessions if it needs to. But then we have these add ons that do something kind of insane. I'm not gonna dive too deep on this because that could be its own video. In fact, I'm probably gonna make a video about it. But I added this thing called Honcho. You can run a Honcho server locally or run it in the cloud. I tried it in the cloud. So here's how this works, and this is crazy. I talked to Hermes. My agent's name is James, James Potter. Every time I send a message, that message is also sent to Honcho. Honcho is a peer service. It's not Hermes. It's kind of a plug in that will start to reason over what I'm saying, and it will start to build out what's called a peer card. Basically, who's Chuck? And it gets to know me. Over time, as more and more messages are sent, it will start to make more conclusions and learn. But that's not the cool part. The cool part is still back at James. With Honcho working in the background, when I send a message to James, in his system prompt, he's getting his USER.md file, his SYSTEM.md file. Now keep in mind, these are all very important because when you're talking to whatever model it is, anthropic, GPT, it's gonna start from scratch. It's a blank slate unless you fill its head with something when you start talking to it. So it has this built in stuff that we give it. But then also Honcho is configured to go, what does James need to know about Chuck right now in this moment? What context would be important based on what Chuck just asked? This combo right here, I can verify because I used Hermes for a month with this setup. It's kind of crazy. What Honcho looks like actually on the cloud. Here are some conclusions it made about me, like my daily habits or that Kathy does not like spice. And it builds up this peer card, which I can't show you completely, of my personality and my traits and my preferences. Like this one. Trait, high friction, technical procrastination, gravitates towards tool building, wiring to avoid high stakes communication or soul work. Ouch. So I was in Tokyo when I first started using James. I would get up early before everyone else, walk the neighborhoods, and just have conversations. It's good. I had some breakthroughs. Now to be fair, Honcho is something you can actually plug into OpenClaw as well, but it's not as good. It's not as much of a first class citizen as it is with Hermes. But honestly, Hermes is pretty stinking great even without this addition. All of this is kinda scary a little bit because you're relying a lot on the AI model to learn things and self correct itself. And should we allow it to do that? I asked Jeff about this. [Jeff] The models are smart. Like, get out of the way with the models, basically. You know? Like, they're smart enough if we let them to just be figure out what it is that you want to do. So at this point, we have our IT agent, Ron. He knows who he is. He's ready to start working. We're about to give him some skills. And, actually, no. We're not. You'll see. The way it does this is so cool. But before we get there, did you know that Hermes was around before OpenClaw? You didn't know that? Me either. I was talking with Jeff, the cofounder, and he told me this. [Jeff] So, actually, Hermes agent started out as an internal tool that we wrote, started it almost six to seven months ago as a tool we were using internally to, like, prototype this recursive self improvement for model training. And when OpenClaw came out, it was actually kind of weird because, like, we actually already have this. At the time, we were aware of the effect it would have on the world. You know, when we saw what OpenClaw did, we're like, we can give this out because we have our own version. When we tried OpenClaw, I mean, I hadn't used it before, but some of the other people in TMR, and they're like, this felt a little clunkier compared to what we had internally. I love that. They tried OpenClaw and was like, wow. This is way clunkier than what we have. Let's release our version to the world because we think it's better. And this is number three, by the way, of the reason I switched from OpenClaw to Hermes. It's the people and the story behind this tool. [Jeff] We are a group of researchers who found each other because we care about making humanistic, censorship free, and democratic AI. And I think that's important. Especially now in the day and age of AI. I think who's making the tools, why they're making the tools, and what they're gonna do going forward is really important for us. And knowing that Hermes was around before, it wasn't just a reaction to OpenClaw, and that it was built by AI researchers, people who are building their own models, which I don't know if you knew that. Nous Research, they literally were just a bunch of hacker nerds in a Discord training their own models, which was also named Hermes. They still have their Hermes models. Hermes agent is separate. But after talking with Jeff, I was even more convinced that this company is pretty cool, and I'm very happy with my decision to switch. [Jeff] AI is not meant to replace you. It's meant to make you be a better version of you every day. And by the way, a lot of what we said, I can't include in this video. It's just it'd be too long. So if you wanna see that full interview, I'm actually gonna launch it first on the NetworkChuck Academy alongside a course we're building. I'm showing you the basics here to get you up and running and going crazy. There's a lot more you can do. So check it out. Link below. Now on to number four. The most powerful thing that Hermes does, it's the headline. It's the grow with you thing that everyone talks about. Better on day 30 than day one. We're gonna give Ron some tools, man. We're gonna make Ron powerful. We're gonna give him some skills, but Hermes does skills in the weirdest way. Watch. It's gonna happen. Right now, he's in the Hostinger cloud. He can't talk to my IT stuff here in my studio. Not yet. We're gonna use Twingate. It's a VPN. It's a way to remote into my stuff, and it's amazing. I'll tell Ron, hey. I need you to set up the headless Twingate client for access to my studio. Here is your key. Make it happen. Now I'm doing this live with you. I'm hoping he'll do what I think he's gonna do here. Fingers crossed. He's gonna start working. He's gonna start building this, and our video editor is gonna blur out my key. Done. Notice he added it to his memory. Cool. Now he's connected to my network. That's cool by itself. Search the network. See what you can find. Oh, did you see that? That's what I've been waiting for right here. I didn't tell him to do this. Self improvement review skill, operations created. Ron just made his own skill. That's the power of Hermes. It makes its own skills. [Jeff] The skill system, which is sort of like the heart of it, which is the ability for it to crystallize once it's viewed how you operate, to take learnings, basically, and crystallize them down into a meaningful chunk that it can then reuse. So we sort of modeled it after kind of how a crude version of how potentially we ourselves work, which is we struggle through things. When we figure out ways that solve hard problems, we note that down, and then we iterate on those successes. What? How powerful is that? And that's a huge differentiator between OpenClaw and Hermes. With OpenClaw, it's all about finding skills in a marketplace, whereas Hermes is all about building skills, repeatable workflows based on your interactions with Hermes. Now Hermes does have a built in skill library that is curated by the Hermes team. [Jeff] One of the prepackaged skills that we do ship is this GitHub PR review, that is in there. That skill actually is like the result of Technium having gone through thousands of PRs manually and built up the review process that we use internally for PR reviews. And now it's like a very high quality crystallized PR system. That's important because, I don't know if you remember. OpenClaw, when it first came out, dude, malware central. Claude hub where you could download a bunch of OpenClaw skills that the community was uploading. Yeah. There was bad stuff in there. OpenClaw had a bunch of CVEs or vulnerabilities that would get you hacked. As of this video, Hermes hasn't had anything agent related hit it yet, and I think it's because of this mentality right here. Also, it's kind of the Hermes team philosophy, keeping things very simple. But it's not just the building of skills that's pretty cool. It's the self improvement loop that I alluded to at the beginning of the video. Hermes just came out with this, a thing called the Curator, which it will be an agent that runs in the background periodically, and it will review the current skills. It will curate skills. It'll make sure your skills are good. If there's a skill that's not relevant anymore, it'll remove it. It'll improve skills as you're working with your agent. It actually moves skills through an active, stale, and archive state, and it exists so that skills created via the self improvement loop don't pile up forever. And by the way, the self improvement loop, this is the mentality for when an agent will create skills. How cool is this? Now I wanna do a callback to that video I made on Perplexity Computer. And one of the things I said in that was that because I couldn't change too much with Perplexity Computer, I couldn't tinker with it too much, I was able to just be creative and actually use it instead of sharpening my axe all the time. Hermes, while I can tweak it, it's certainly tweakable, it's less. It also just kinda works and does its own thing and figures things out, allowing me to just work with it, tell it to do things, and it figures it out, kinda in that same vein. And I think that's why it's so successful for most people. Like what Jeff said, we're kinda just getting out of the agent's way. [Jeff] Get out of the way of them and let the models be smart, basically. And just give them the hand like, the model is the brain. We just needed to give it the hands, the feet, the fingers to touch the world in an appropriate way. And then once it has that haptic feedback, really, that's what it is. Like, the harness is the haptic feedback to the model of the world. It's a weird thought, but it works. Now back to Ron. He found a bunch of stuff. He wants to do a deeper search. Go for it, dude. Now while Ron's doing that here, I'm gonna go talk to Ron in Telegram, start a new session here, and let's do something fun. Built into Hermes is a Home Assistant skill. I use Home Assistant to run my studio. Let's make some things happen. I'll tell him to enable it first. I think it's disabled by default. Brilliant. The Home Assistant wanted to switch on. I love the way he talks. Let me give him the IP address and key, and let's see what he does. And look at that. He's figuring things out, saving it to his memory. Let's test it. Got that lamp behind me. Let's tell him to turn it off. Can you turn off Chuck Lamp? See what happens. He did it. Yes. Let's say turn it on and make it blue. Also notice, I'm talking to Ron in two different places, and he's doing two different things. Ah, he did it. Oh, this is fun. One more thing. We have automatic blinds in there. They're all open. I wanna see if he can do this. Alright. I'm gonna go film it and see if that happens. Here we go. What happened? There's one in the kitchen. He got it. He found it. I told you, IT is magic. Back on the network side, Ron is wanting some UniFi access. Should we give it to him? Now notice, this is what I learned from the Hermes team, from Jeff. Rather than the hubris of being like, I know exactly all the skills or I know exactly all the things that you need, like, the models are smart. Like, get out of the way of the models, I don't have to bring on this fully onboarded IT admin with skills that I created and everything. No. I just bring him on like a person and say, hey. You need to manage this thing. Go look at it. And he'll figure it out. This is the IT admin I was looking for. I'll see. I'm getting you UniFi creds now while you're waiting. Research everything you can about UniFi. So you are ready to go. Now notice I'm not pointing these things out because they're not new things to the agent world, but it can delegate tasks. It can do sub agents. It's a fully functional agent harness. I'm just honing in on the main things that make it awesome. Also notice you can interrupt, steer, or queue messages. So if I send something right now by default, it would interrupt him and go, oh, what does Chuck need? Instead, I'll just queue and say here is your UniFi API key. He finished his inventory. Realized he couldn't get very far without username and password, but self improvement. Created a UniFi network operation skill. Let me give him a user account. Now we'll come back to this. We'll see how far he goes. Well, we gotta move on to number five. And this one is just funny because it goes back to the idea that OpenClaw was kinda clunky. Jeff's team said it themselves. This felt a little clunkier compared to what we had internally. And that was my experience. When I initially set up OpenClaw, it was like, oh, this is so cool. It's so powerful. But I don't know about you, but over time, it kind of degraded, and it would break. An update would break it, or it just wouldn't respond. I'd be like, hey. Are you there? Are you awake? It became super frustrating, and it wasn't a thing I wanted to give out to my wife or my friends and family. It was one of those things where you had to be an IT person that knew how to troubleshoot it because it was a project. And that's how OpenClaw feels. It feels like a project, whereas Hermes feels more like a product. And I gotta tell you, I've been using it. I could have made a video a month ago about this, but I wanted to give it some time. I wanted to actually just see if it's cool. I haven't had I don't think I've had one issue. Nothing I didn't cause myself. And my wife is having a great time talking to her friend, Honey, who's helping her with homeschool and diet planning and just managing the house for six kids. We have six kids, six daughters. So number five, in case you didn't realize it, was that Hermes just doesn't break. The team behind this, they're AI engineers, and I think that's important. And their mentality behind this matters. They're not just gonna add a bunch of features to make it bloated or to compete with somebody else. And sure, it has pretty much feature parity with OpenClaw. It just doesn't allow a bunch of things that shouldn't be there. They have a philosophy coming into this, which is kinda just get out of the agent's way. Jeff told us earlier, or maybe he didn't. I don't know we included that quote. [Jeff] Get out of the way with the model. We're at a point now to where the AI models we're getting, they're good. Like, if we stopped getting new models at this point, I think we would be at a point where we could have AGI. What matters the most now is using the right harness, tweaking the tools around it to make. Because Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, I mean, things are good. Use something like Hermes with it, you really start to realize, oh my gosh. You can do a lot more. Again, you wanna hear more about the philosophy behind Hermes, I talked with the cofounder for a while. That interview should be live right now on the academy. Now beyond number five, Hermes is shipping features. Like, now, there's a Hermes dashboard. Look at this. If you wanna learn how to do this, by the way, we'll also have that in the course. I can only show you so many things here, but check this out. You can get in here and look at your skills and plug ins. You can add more agents, more profiles, add more models. You can have auxiliary models where you can have one big model that does your main thinking, but maybe have another one that does research or one that's dedicated to delegation. They have achievements, which is kind of fun. Again, the vibe is so awesome. Let them cook. Agent autonomy. And then one of the most powerful things they released recently is Kanban. You can actually set up a task. You're like, create me a Pokemon card for NetworkChuck. Use my likeness. Make it an HTML page, make it look awesome. I'll assign it to default because that's the profile, and we'll create it. And there it goes. How cool is that? You can jump into it and see the progress as we hit a rate limit. You can add comments. It will stop and ask for human input if it needs it, and it got blocked because I hit my usage limit. But you get the picture. Also, just came out their own computer use, which allows it to control your computer. I think it's still in preview, but, man, they're moving things along. It's becoming very exciting. I'm kind of a fanboy. I'm being honest. Like, it's fun. I like the vibe. I like the people. I'm not sponsored by them, but I think they're really cool. Let me know what you think. Like, try Hermes, and you can run OpenClaw and Hermes side by side. You can do your OpenClaw migration. You can do your test. I converted. Are you gonna convert? Let me know in the comments below. That's all I got. I'll catch you guys next time. You made it to the end of the video. If you're new here, at the end of my videos, I like to pray for you, my audience. I'm gonna get some more coffee real quick. Now I know it's a weird thing. A YouTuber praying for his audience. Well, I believe in the power of prayer even if you don't. And you know what? Just stick around. You never know what's gonna happen. I'm not trying to force anything on you. I just genuinely care about you, and I believe that this is a powerful thing. So let's do it. One, two, three, pray. God, I thank you for the person on the other side of this camera, this screen. I just thank you for who they are. I thank you that they are passionate about technology, that they're interested in AI, and I pray you bless that. I pray that right now with the way the world is, with AI moving so quickly that you will be able to calm them down, let them not be too stressed, and point them to the good things to use, the things that will elevate them as a human, the things that will encourage them. And let them not sell their soul to AI. Let them not offload the things that they need to do to AI. Help them figure that out, God. Equip them with the gifts they need. Bless their families right now. Let their families be prosperous and blessed and healthy. Bless their marriages and their children. I pray blessings over them right now. Bless them as they try out these new AI tools, and I pray that through this learning, through this just tinkering, that this will produce opportunities for them they never even imagined. Job opportunities, income opportunities, or just breakthroughs in their relationships or just their own thinking. I pray this over them, God, and I thank you for them. It's in Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Thank you for letting me do that.