Someone recommended I look at Hermes Agent as an alternative to OpenClaw. I've been running OpenClaw on the homelab since early May — it drives a Discord bot backed by Qwen 3.6 on an RTX 5090, with MCP tools wired into a fitness tracker. It works, mostly. The "mostly" is why I was open to alternatives.
What I expected: a quick install, a side-by-side comparison, a blog post with a verdict. What I got instead was a research rabbit hole that changed my understanding of why my existing setup had been flaky in the first place.
What Hermes Actually Is
Two things from the same org (Nous Research):
Hermes Models — fine-tuned LLMs trained specifically for function calling, with native <tool_call> tokens baked into the weights. The model knows the tool-calling grammar because it was trained on it.
