hermes-agent VS zed

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:

A bit O/T but:

> I have never been a big fan of pull requests.

I guess this partly explains why Zed (still) lacks a PR review flow, let alone a coherent one, despite some interest [1]. Pretty much the only reason I’m still with JetBrains.

[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759

Devcontainers + Claude + Pi

[1] Zed https://zed.dev/

[2] Terminal threads https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads

As sort of byproduct also replaced Alacritty + Zellij (i just don't have the need to use more, 3 weeks of new setup)

That said, sometimes you do just want an editor, not a full blown IDE, and for that for the last few months I've been experimenting with Zed. It's okay. I've had some weird issues with their terminal emulator; I don't know what they are doing but my ZSH config doesn't load right so it sometimes gets stuck in what looks like an infinite loop, and then my PATH is all messed up... IDK, I expect my editors to kinda just work, but overall, I like the look and feel and for when I just need to edit a file, it's fine.

That's a link to a hacker news post, which links to a reddit post, which links to https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 if anyone wants to go right to the 'open' issue.

This is a post-mortem, not a launch post. Paneflow is a native terminal workspace, splits, panes, branch-aware workspaces, session restore, built in pure Rust on top of Zed's GPUI framework and the upstream alacritty_terminal crate. It started as a port of cmux, a macOS-only Swift/AppKit project, and the Rust rewrite forced a string of decisions I had no good intuition for at the start. I want to walk through the ones that mattered: which UI frameworks I tried and rejected, how the GPUI/alacritty boundary actually looks, how dev-server detection works under the hood, the N-ary layout tree that replaced binary splits, the cross-platform PTY plumbing, the JSON-RPC control plane that makes agents first-class, and four lessons that surprised me.

Copying my own comment below, with GH links and my (non-AI) summary after skimming:

> https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7054

> https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

> TL;DR: Mix of language tooling, unsigned proprietary blobs, corrupted and/or GLIBC-dependent files, redundant copies of already-installed executables. The Node packages especially are able to run scripts on install. Personal preference aside, might also create issues with security laws, certifications. All without user consent.

> Issues opened in January and June 2024. They've been rejected, closed, and opened a couple times since then. No changes directly improving this yet as of April 2026.

So... If you want broad language support via LSP servers, then you're going to have to bring in other ecosystems, and Node/Typescript is a big one that doesn't always have alternatives. [0] That's not a Zed-specific problem.

IMO the real issue with Zed is the "runs them by default without asking" part. Plus the questionable practices with binary blobs and the cavalier attitude towards it, when I can just use an editor that... Doesn't do any of that.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/impleme...

Just injecting this here: What I've been missing is an equivalent for GitHub's "blame prior revision" feature to quickly follow through the history of individual source lines.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/42583

Thanks for building an awesome product :)

Zed - https://zed.dev/

Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).

Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).