Hermes Agent - The Openclaw Killer?

Good morning, my gorgeous goose. In today's episode, I will show you how to set up Hermes agent from [music] scratch. This is kind of an alternative to OpenClaw, if you're unfamiliar with it. Both of these tools are essentially like wrappers around an AI and that [music] have this harness that essentially gives them tools and abilities to control the operating system. [music] So, whether that's to cat something, to copy, to create new files, this can do it all. Let's get into it and I cannot thank today's sponsor Hostinger enough for making this video possible. So, why pick something like Hermes over OpenClaw when OpenClaw has a huge ecosystem? It's a well-established community now and it was the first one on the market essentially, right? And a lot of features as well, uh has probably the most amount of messaging channels that you can hook up to it. Uh so, why? Well, in my experience, OpenClaw has just been an absolute nightmare to configure properly, to have a good proper setup with it. It took me 2 days uh to just make sure that it doesn't run into security issues, uh that everything works properly. Whereas on the Hermes side, they essentially looked at OpenClaw and kind of learned from it and made it as simple as possible. So, on Hermes side, the whole installation process and setup takes no more than 5 minutes and a lot of the features that you'd have to manually set up on OpenClaw is already baked in here, which is awesome. Uh like, I'm not joking. Setting up OpenClaw what is like setting up an operating system and I've been like an easy one, like Arch Linux. It's It's really hard. Uh you You like, honestly need a huge manual to make sure you understand all the features that it even gives you. So, that's a huge advantage, but one more thing is the the way memory worked on OpenClaw kind of sucked. Um I would So, OpenClaw creates a file for you for every every session you have and even for like the days, it does that for you. And there's a lot of things that you can do to manage that, but it just never for in my experience, never did a good job recalling any of that. Whereas with Hermes, it's the first agent that has a built-in learning loop. So, it has the ability to automatically create skill skills from experiences, it improves them, it saves important information about each session and stores them and has the ability to recall it, kind of like in an SQL database. It's really really cool. Now, where should you run this? Well, you can do it locally on your machine, but I actually don't recommend that too much because you will have important and sensitive information on your computer and you're essentially giving the AI full complete control. And even though these applications like OpenClaw and Hermes are marked as beta and beta, uh they're more like alpha. They're still in their infancy. This is kind of a new thing still, right? It hasn't really been around for too long. So, some disadvantages of running it on your local machine. Well, when you turn your computer off, it'll go offline, right? You won't be able to message it from your Telegram. Uh so, that's a big disadvantage. Second of all, you have limited resources as well. Um you could potentially scale up if you're running a VPS or something like that to give it more power. Whereas here, you're kind of limited to your own computer. Um but yeah, that's probably the big one for me is the security and also, you know, not having access to uh the local machine 24/7, which kind of sucks. So, what do I recommend instead? Go for a VPS. VPS will run 24/7, it will have persistent memory and if you want to scale it eventually in the future, you could. And thankfully, Hostinger has made this process really easy with a one-click deploy of Hermes agent straight to a new VPS. And I cannot recommend Hostinger enough. I've been with them for a couple of years now. If you want a really solid, reliable VPS that you can run 24/7 and you can come back a year later and find it in the exact same state, Hostinger is the one for you. I highly recommend the KVM 2 plan here. It's $6.99, but I'll have a special partnership with them, so I can get you an extra 10% off and you get 8 GB 8 TB, sorry, of bandwidth, 100 GB of NVMe. This is really really fast and 8 GB of RAM, too. So, let's click deploy here and you can use the special little code here. So, if you go here to the coupon, you can add at Hermes here and apply that and you get an another 10% off of that. So, it's really six dollars here for a month for this, which is amazing. So, cool. Okay, I'll choose the 24 months here and you can also do daily backup if you want, if you want to revert back. And for the server location, you essentially want to pick the closest one to your location because you're essentially sending a request and waiting for that request to get back. The longer the distance, well, the slower it gets. Speed of light things, okay? Uh so, let's hit continue here and check this out. Okay, now that we are on our server, uh you want to secure this and I've done a video on this on the OpenClaw one, where we essentially look at how to block uh all the ports, all the open ports with firewall, how to make a new user, disable root login. There's a lot of things that go in this. Uh also setting up with Tailscale. If you're interested in that, check out the link in the description below. I'll link the OpenClaw video where we do a full security setup. But it's really easy to forget all these stuff. So, what I actually recommend you is this little package here. It's fantastic. It's called VPS audit and this essentially checks all the different things that you might need to secure down in a fresh new VPS. It's fantastic. I'll leave this in the description as well. But essentially, what you want to do is just download the script, you make it executable here and then you simply run pseudo VPS audit. So, if I run this on a brand new VPS here, you're going to see there's a couple of problems, like the I can log in with root, which we don't want to do. We also want to disable password login. We also want to make sure firewall is enabled and stuff like this. So, this is a great way to get started because again, it's hard to keep track of all the different security things you need to do. But since we one-click deployed Hermes through Hostinger, we can just simply run Hermes setup here. So, let's run that. We're going to do a quick setup and here we [music] can pick the provider that we want to use and I've been really enjoying Kimiko 2.6 on OpenCode. Go, fantastic model, really cheap and really fast as well. The The Chinese models have been just blowing me away. So, I'm going to go with that, but again, you can do Open AI. Even CloudCode works, as far as I know. So, it's going to ask you to do the API key. Make sure you do that and paste it in and I'm going to pick Kimiko 2.6. [music] I'm going to set up messaging as well. Now, out of all of these, Telegram is still the easiest one to get going. I tried Discord and Slack, but it's just not really worth going through all the hassle, honestly. Telegram is still super easy. So, I'm going to reconfigure this. I already have it, but let me just quickly show you how you can do this. It's going to ask you for a Telegram bot here. So, open up Telegram. You want to go to BotFather here and you want to say new bot. There we go. It's going to ask you to give it a name. I'm going to say Hermie the clan key. There we go and you also need a username, where you just add underscore bot at the end. So, I'm going to say Hermie the clan key bot, like that. Cool. So, that's going to give you a token here. Make sure you don't share this with anyone. Copy that, paste it down here, hit enter. And now, we also need to get [music] an ID. So, you basically link Telegram to the bot, so only you can message it and nobody else. And they make this process really easy. It was a bit more complicated to do on OpenClaw. But here, essentially, what you need to do is go to user info. So, search this guy up here on Telegram, user info bot and you just say start and it'll give you this ID. So, I'll copy this over, paste the ID in there and that's it. I'm going to hit yes and you are good to go. We're going to restart the gateway and that should be working. I'm going to launch it here to to just test it out. Let's give it a go. I'm going to search up Hermie the clan key bot. There we go. I'm going to click on them, hit start and I'm going to say hey and see if this works. And we can also test it here. Hey. And looks like it's up and running here. I got a message back. Let's also give it another go here cuz it didn't really respond yet. It might need a second and there we go, typing. Great. So, now it's essentially all hooked up. You can do this from your phone, you can control it. You don't need to do anything from uh the the interface here, the TUI. The first thing would be cool to set up is something like voice mode. And jokes on you, we don't need to do any setup for voice mode. It's automatically enabled. Check this out. I said, "Hey, can you hear this?" And it did. It automatically had this all set up for me. And the cool part is it also responds in voice mode back to you, which is super cool. So, nothing needs to be done on that front. I remember I spent 10 minutes just getting uh the voice whisper LLM thing set up on OpenClaw and it was way slower as well. I find this to be at least two to three times faster. You know what else is automatically set up for you? Is navigating the web or taking screenshots in the Chrome browser. Check this out. Go on YouTube and take a screenshot of the home page for me. And check this out. It navigates it over to the browser, and even saw that it was a cookie consent dialogue that was blocking the screen. So, I clicked that, and then it sent me back a screenshot. Check that out. So, it works. It works really, really well straight out the box. Now, this is it might be a bit slower if you want to do something like this cuz it would physically open up a headless like Chromium browser and navigate over then click and stuff for you. Uh but, if you want to scrape the internet really quickly, we can set up something like Firecrawl. This is free to a certain degree, so we can just use the free version. And there's a couple of other paid products that lets you scrape the web. Brave also has it. Uh but, I recommend you with this cuz it's free and it's just really quick to get up and going. So, I I just want to Firecrawl here. I'm going to do the onboarding. I'm going to say hand it to my agent, and you will be given an API key. So, make sure you copy that over. I'm just going to ask Hermes to set up for me. I'm going to say set up Firecrawl for me and save the API key. And also, if you manually want to do it, you essentially just need to set firecrawl_api_key in your dot slash hermes.env file. That's essentially it. And once you do that, Hermes will automatically recognize that for you. And there we go, it's done. It says Firecrawl clock And there we go, it's done. It says Firecrawl cloud mode is figured. The web search crawl tool will use Firecrawl as the browser provider when needed. That is such a mouthful to say. Oh my god, you try to say this really quickly. Trust me. Geez. Okay, so now that that's set up, we can do our first little fun thing. So, what are fun use cases? Well, it depends on your life really, right? The cool part is that after a while, this like really learns and like saves like really key concepts about you, which is super fun. First of all, I wouldn't say tell it about your name, tell it about your location and stuff like that cuz that's still a security issue. But, maybe like your food preferences, you know, and like kind of what you do. Um and it's really cool. Like one thing I did was I I keep telling it what kind of things I like for for breakfast and stuff like that. And it would recommend me new recipes based on why I like them while I haven't day by day. It's really helpful. Uh another thing for me personally is I like to follow certain stocks and also get kind of a daily brief of like what's going on in the market. So, let's try something like that. I can say, "Uh let's set up a cron job that tracks these stocks." [music] So, I'm going to say Adobe. I'm going to say now, ServiceNow. I'm going to also say uh something like CRM, which is um Salesforce. And maybe AMD because it's been popping off. I'm going to say, "Every morning give me the current price of these stocks. And also, give me a quick daily brief of what's going on in the market." After you set up this cron job, uh do a test run to see if I receive it. Okay, let's run this. There we go. It's scheduled that cron job for me to track all these four stocks every day at 9:00 a.m. UTC, and it's going to deliver it to my Telegram. Uh you can also have a look at the current crons you have. If you do a slash, by the way, here's all the different commands that you have. And I also recommend that after you finish a certain task, just reset the session. Create a fresh session. It's going to work better. So, you have new you have history as well if you want to go and kind of have a look at previous conversations. Uh you have undo, compress to essentially take the whole context and smash it down [music] into couple lines that just summarizes everything if you want to continue. Uh but, you can also check the cron jobs you have active. So, slash cron. There we go. We have one set up here for the stocks. And check it out. If I have a look at Telegram, there is my brief. So, we have the stock prices, but also have a little market brief here with how Nasdaq and the S&P [music] has been doing today. And wow, oil prices are going crazy. That's fun. What I like about Hermes is that you can also customize the personality, but you also have a couple already set up for you. So, if I want to do something like slash personality, as you can see, it gives you this whole list here. Uh you can have a kawaii one. Uh you can have a concise or a technical agent here for you. Or a hypebeast. I'm going to go with a kawaii one. So, I'm going to say slash personality. Oops. There we go. And when you select this, you're going to say kawaii. There we go. Select that and hit enter. And there we go. There is a lot of nice built-in skills and features that Hermes also has. So, if you want to work with PDFs and you want to extract text or scan documents, you want to you can do slash OCR and documents. Um it's really cool. You also have notion if you want to hook this up, nano PDF, you have diffusion models, maps, a bunch of different stuff. So, make sure you go through this if you are a user of Obsidian maybe for creating notes, and you like that, that's available for you as well. Probably one of the most powerful things you can do with Hermes is to vibe code off your phone and also being able to kind of see what your agent is up to and view the applications and website it creates. So, this is the one I recommend you do the most. So, I essentially create a new GitHub account for this bot specifically. This way, it's you know, it's not on my main GitHub. Can't do anything malicious on it or by accident. So, it's its own little space. So, what I like to do is make an account and then just simply go on Telegram and ask ask it to set it up. I want to set up a GitHub so you can push code on it. Um Give me the SSH key so I can add it on github.com. And then after that, uh make sure you have Git installed and just maybe create a simple HTML file that we can try to push up. Okay, it looks like it already made the changes, and it just asked me which repo I want to push it up to. So, I just said, "I'll make your own repo. It's fine." Okay, let's give a refresh here on GitHub and take a look. There, it worked. We can push up code just fine. Now, here's the powerful thing. You can actually tunnel this and actually view the project. So, what you can do is have it open it up. And well, this is just a HTML file. So, technically, you can just have it open the browser and then send a screenshot for you. But, what I want to do say something like, "Hey, also set up something like Cloudflare tunnels for free so we can preview our projects." Even though this is a HTML file, let's try to just make me a tunnel so I can view it. Uh but, for future projects as well, especially if it's like React or Next.js. Uh if we have our development server up and running, we want to have the ability uh to for me to ask you basically to give me a link so I can preview it. And there we go. Look at that, it's got up and running. It didn't give me the link for some reason, but it works if you ask it to. But, it took a little screenshot of the current application I just made. How cool is that? So, you can just literally vibe code on your phone and then have it send you a link, and then you can make the changes all on the go. Super cool. So, hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know what are your thoughts on Hermes agent. Do you like it? Do you not? Have you tried it? I'm curious to see what you say. And yeah, thank you again Hostinger for sponsoring this episode. Check it out in the link in the description below. If you go to hostinger.com/at_hermes to get your 10% off using the coupon code at_hermes. All right, catch you guys in the next one. Peace.