6 Hermes Use Cases that Openclaw Never Had

The Hermes agent is one of the most powerful agents out there, but people don't really know how powerful it can get when it's actually used to optimize the processes they interact with daily. Now, some of you who have been using Open Claw might think it has the same use case, and yes, it does, but Hermes has extra features built in that Open Claw never had, and those are what make it so much more powerful. Before [snorts] we move on to the use cases and how they'd help you, we just wanted to mention that the Hermes agent now has a desktop app, which is basically a wrapper around the agent setup. In the previous video, we were using the terminal interface, but after testing the desktop app, we found it's a much more interactive way to use it than the terminal UI, because the interface makes it way easier to monitor the agents in action and set up the configs. Also, check out that previous video, because using Claude code with Hermes agent opens up a lot of new use cases. The biggest difference for us was managing multiple profiles. A profile is basically an individual Hermes agent with its own separate memory and skills, which keeps your different personas isolated from each other. On the terminal, you'd have to run a bunch of commands just to manage and switch between profiles. But with the desktop app, you can run several profiles in parallel and delegate tasks to each one at the same time. If you want to install it, you just download the installer for whichever operating system you're on and run it, and Hermes is ready to use. Once it's installed, you can configure the rest of the settings from the settings pane, where you'll set up your model, tools, and everything else we showed you how to configure in our previous video. Since we'd already set the agent up in the previous video, the desktop app just picked up those same configs and carried them over. The only difference between the TUI and the desktop app is that now you're doing all of this through the UI. You can also configure the skills you want to enable from the skills panel. From that same settings panel, you can manage the memory cap we mentioned in our previous video, which maintains memory and profile budgets in terms of character count. We just wanted to mention the desktop app before diving into the use case, in case you'd rather work with it, but you can do all of this from the TUI as well. Now, [snorts] there's this feature that opens up a lot of ways to use the Hermes agent, and it's called the wake agent feature. Just like your phone that's always on do not disturb, the agent stays on it, too. But, unlike you, it actually picks up when it's needed. Wake agent is basically a flag in the script that we use in the cron task, and it actually decides while running whether the Hermes agent should actually use the LLM or not. If the wake agent flag is set to false, the LLM won't get called for that event. So, the agent only fires when there's an actual change worth paying attention to. What this does is save you the cost of having the LLM fire on things it shouldn't be handling. This wasn't possible with Open Claw, where the agent would run on every cron job, even when it wasn't needed. But, with this flag, the scheduled job gets a free decision-maker that decides whether spending costly LLM tokens is even justified in the first place. You can use it for a lot of things. For example, you can set up a group of cron jobs with skills that monitor your AWS costs along with the Gemini API you've configured for a project, and if those costs rise higher than usual, it can report that in a configured channel. If you don't want it to just report, you can connect the Stripe MCP and other tools and let it take actions based on that, too. The reason this works so well is you're not invoking the agent and wasting tokens on events where there's no cost spike. Instead, the agent only gets invoked when a cost spike actually happens. You can use the same flag to let the agent manage reviews on your Google Play Store app, and for that, you just need to configure the Google Play API to access the app's reviews and set up the right cron job for it. But, it doesn't just reply to customers leaving one-star reviews. The agent can also report those reviews in Slack and help identify the issues people are facing, sending meaningful updates so you get a proper understanding of how real users actually feel about the app, and you can make improvements based on that feedback. The previous [snorts] automation used the wake agent feature to call the LLM only when something needed attention. But, there's another flag worth knowing about called no agent. This one gets the job done without ever invoking the AI model at all. So, you might be thinking that if there's no AI model involved, then this is just a normal cron job. Now, that is true, but what sets it apart is that it still runs inside the Hermes ecosystem. It works almost like a regular cron job, except that Hermes already has way more context about how you work. So, setting one up is easier than setting up the same thing on another system. For example, we set up a cron job with this flag to monitor certain metrics such as the TLS to make sure the website doesn't suddenly stop working. It also monitors Stripe app health and other important for an application and then post the health check updates straight into a Slack channel. Hermes builds that cron job for you using the no agent flag set as true. The big upside of these jobs is they're practically free since there's no agent involved at all. Once you give Hermes a prompt to set one up, it pulls in the skills it needs and builds the whole automation for you, which makes it way easier to keep an eye on things day-to-day. And whenever you want Hermes to actually act on one of those alerts, whether that's fixing the issue or anything else, you just tag it in the chat and tell it what you need and it takes care of while keeping all the existing context. Now, another use case we're going to talk about is implementing the Hermes agent as the second brain of your organization. The way it works is you connect the Hermes bot to your Slack workspace and have all your team members interact with it directly. This works way better than other platforms because of the evolving memory and skills it has, which let it observe your day-to-day tasks and turn them into reusable workflows while gathering so much context about you that it ends up knowing you better than your own mom does. So, as people use and invoke the Hermes agent, it gathers context on what the company is, what it does, all the tasks, and all the progress being made. Then it creates a skill that holds everything it needs to understand the company's operations, and with that skill, it acts as a complete second brain for your company. This way, Hermes becomes a central hub that tracks everything. It shares all that context across the team, so your team members can invoke it directly and ask questions or check on things across the organization. Your project manager can even use it to track goals because it already has the context and progress on the different initiatives, and from there it can assign tasks to teammates and update them based on the goals you've set. Hermes holds up as a second brain because it does well on long-running tasks. A good example is each team member interacting with the agent over time, and its memory editing feature is what lets it sustain that kind of workflow. But an agent like Open Clock can't keep this up because its soul file gets so bloated that it starts losing sight of what it actually needs to focus on. So you'd have to reset that soul file to make sure that it remains effective in the long run. If you like these use cases, subscribe to the channel and click the notification bell. On the channel, we post content that helps you learn new ways to optimize different processes in different businesses with AI. Your support would mean a lot to us. Aside from acting as your second brain, Hermes' ever-evolving memory and skills also let it take actions on your behalf. If you're feeling lazy, you can let it auto respond to all your potential leads based on the info it's collected throughout your use of the agent and the skills it's built along the way. Hermes comes with built-in skills for accessing Google Workspace through scripts that let the agent interact with Google products. To connect Hermes to your Gmail, you first need to configure a project on Google Cloud and get its credentials. That setup is pretty long, but it's just simple steps. You can ask Claude or grab the setup from our community in AI Labs Pro. Once you've added the credentials and the callback token, Hermes is connected to Gmail. This unlocks everything for reading, sending, and replying to emails. And from there, you can use this setup for your email automations. With Gmail setup, the next step is to automate your processes. For that, you can create a webhook. A webhook is basically a way for one app to notify another that some event happened, so the other app can take action based on it. You can use Hermes to create one that replies to all the emails that look like potential leads coming into the Gmail account you've connected. It generates those replies based on everything it knows about the company. So instead of you manually sending emails, it handles the whole thing on its own. To do this, it uses its skills for creating webhooks along with the company skill it maintains for organizational context and builds a webhook that monitors incoming emails and analyzes them to spot potential customers and generate responses for them. So, once this is in place, whenever it detects an email that looks like it's from a potential customer, it reaches out and responds using the company's information. It generates the right responses based on the context it has. And if a meeting's involved, it can even schedule it on your calendar based on your open time slots. As we talked about in a previous video, you can create a PRD as a skill. We covered why keeping it as a skill instead of a plain document matters because a skill only gets loaded when it's actually needed and stays in the fresh part of the context window where the model is paying attention, so the agent never loses track of the requirements that matter. And since that skill already knows everything about the product you're building, you can reuse the same setup and ask it to analyze your competitors, too. On your Hermes setup, you can create a cron job that studies those competitors and updates the PRD with potential features you could add while also maintaining a separate document that tracks how those competitors are progressing. This saves you time, so instead of manually checking X for updates, you'll finally get more time to waste doomscrolling. Hermes sets up the cron job for you, and the frequency is usually weekly since that's roughly how often competitors ship updates. The job maintains a list of competitors, creates competitive analysis files, and keeps updating the PRD on its own. Those files basically become part of the agent's context, so you can take the recommendations it generates and act on them as you're building the product. This way you stay on top of what your competitors are doing and have a real shot at staying ahead of them. And in the same way, you can build plenty of other workflows on top of the skills and context that Hermes keeps building up. Another [snorts] thing you can hand off to Hermes is your social media. There's a skill called XURL, which basically automates content posting to X. This is especially useful for us because we often need to repurpose content from one format into another. A good example is how we turn our long format video scripts into X posts and LinkedIn posts. With the Hermes agent, this becomes way easier because it already knows what our voice sounds like and how we usually write our posts since it has all that context. So, we can create a new skill where we hand it a video script and it generates posts for both X and LinkedIn and writes them into a specific folder. The reason we write them into a folder instead of posting them directly is we still want a human review step in between since there are often corrections to make. This way we can make sure the content going to the accounts is accurate and tailored to what we want. Once the skill is configured, you load it with the slash command and the skill name and then hand it the video script you want posts for. It drafts both posts in that same folder, makes sure the X post respects the character limit, and waits for us to review them so we can tailor them to our needs. Once we review the generated posts, we can just go to the Hermes agent and ask it to post them on X and it invokes the skill and publishes the post for us. But before we end the video, let's have a word by our sponsor. Making content about AI tools, I've realized using them is easy but actually understanding how they work gives you a real edge. That's why I've been using Brilliant and they're sponsoring today's video. 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