The only Hermes Agent tutorial you’ll ever need (June 2026 edition)

TL;DR

• Hermes beats OpenClaw on reliability right now — Alex says OpenClaw has become bloated and routinely breaks on update, while Hermes feels faster, lighter, and much less painful for normal users to maintain.

• Claude is best, GPT is the practical middle ground — he recommends Anthropic for top performance if you can stomach API costs of a few hundred dollars a month, while saying newer GPT options are finally usable inside agents and work well for tighter budgets.

• Telegram is the best home for your agent — among Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, and iMessage, he strongly prefers Telegram because it is actively becoming AI-agent-friendly with features like topics and better agent-to-agent workflows.

• The killer feature is self-improvement through skills and memory — Hermes reviews how it completed a task, saves that path as a reusable skill, and keeps getting more customized to your workflows over time.

• The Kanban board turns your morning to-do list into autonomous execution — Alex dumps AI-suitable tasks into triage, lets Hermes split them into subtasks and assign sub-agents, then comes back from breakfast with “half my to-do list done.”

• His strongest opinion is that Hermes security fears are overblown — he argues the agent only does what you tell it to do, rejects the advice to isolate it on a VPS or separate accounts, and says good judgment matters more than elaborate sandboxing.

The Breakdown