hermes-agent VS claude-code

NousResearch publishes a detailed security policy for Hermes Agent. It is unusually clear about what the project treats as load-bearing and what it does not. If you operate Hermes in the cloud, read it first; this post is the operator-friendly companion, not a replacement.

OpenCode seemed perfectly workable as a programming assistant. As personal assistants, they all fall short. It's too difficult to really shape their output.

I was briefly impressed with OpenClaw a few times, but ultimately was turned off by not being able to get the models to stop being so damnably verbose. I thought I made progress for a while by having it tweak its soul, iterate, switch models, iterate, switch models, fuse the results, iterate... but ultimately it's all forgotten early in each session. And then one day it killed itself by rebuilding the container it was inside.

Hermes apparently has some plagiarism issues they're trying to cover up [0] and I was deeply unimpressed with their janky, flickery CLI that force-enables a bulky obnoxious header.

Nanoclaw and nanobot seemed fine, but not notably different. There were some common bugs and glitches that caused some minor data loss while configuring nanobot. After that I just deciding to start hacking my own together.

What I really want in a harness is being able to actually control and rewrite the entire context window, like Zed's Text Threads before they obnoxiously and inexplicably removed what, to me, was their most powerful and distinguishing feature.

[0] https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/10232

I've opened a design discussion to argue this out before anyone writes a line of it, because a surprise PR to a security-sensitive module is the wrong way to start. Feedback from people who've thought about supply-chain trust is what I appreciate.

Source: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent framework.

I opened my Hermes Agent logs and found something I did not know existed: an auxiliary: block with twelve background tasks. Compression, web extraction, vision, session search, skills matching — all running silently every time I typed a message. Every task was set to provider: auto. And because I had no API keys for the fallback chain, every one silently fell back to kimi-k2.6, my one-trillion-parameter main model.

The adjacent tools worth tracking: the OpenAI Chrome plugin, BrowserCode, Autobrowse, browser-harness, Pi browser extensions, and Hermes browser skills. [13] [14] [6] [15] [16] [12] The category is logged-in browser work: support queues, internal tools, research, scraping, QA, admin ops, and anything where the useful data sits behind a session.

hermes-telemetry solves both by giving you real-time observability and automatic budget enforcement for Hermes Agent.

If you haven't encountered it yet: Hermes Agent is an open-source agentic system from Nous Research. The key differentiators that caught my attention:

You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

agents are everywhere nowadays, one left a long pointless comment on a bug report i submitted on github. well, a bug report that an agent submitted on my behalf. agents all the way down. maybe i'm part of the problem.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66085

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66780

Censored because I'm writing a paper. :)

Oh and forget learning about chemistry. Only criminals want to learn organic chemistry. :(

Anthropic's own frontend-design skill attempts to do that. You can install it in Claude Code, or you can tweak it to be closer to your own style:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

But what I find works best is to point Claude at a design system documentation website (your own company's or another public source) and tell it to use that design style. It usually does OK, and the results are usually much more in line with that style and not as Claude-y.

Quick grounding for anyone new: Claude Code is Anthropic's official agentic coding tool — an AI coding assistant that lives in your terminal. It reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands, and integrates with your dev tools through natural language. It runs in the terminal, in VS Code/Cursor and JetBrains, in a desktop app, on the web at claude.ai/code, and in the Claude iOS app — all sharing the same engine, so your CLAUDE.md, settings, and MCP servers travel with you.

anthropics/claude-code Issue #13717 (MCP at ~49% of context)

Source: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/65697

However, with the VSCode extension, even if I perform a /clear, the source is overwritten as startup. This is a known issue tracked in GitHub issue #49937. It works if you use the CLI alone, but it cannot be identified when using the extension.