Herdr is a fantastic product and I've experienced almost no bugs. Can't actually remember if I've come across one. For ease of use, nothing else comes close for running remote sessions, or local for that matter.
The ability to connect to remote systems inside a local tui sounds fine but it's already a terrific remote solution! Try it out if you haven't!
Time with my young adult children. They are all out of the house, recently, and there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING more valuable/meaningful to us than when they come home for a visit or we spend time out in the world.
I lived a short time in my 20s with friends a few blocks from my parents. When I returned to live with my parents for a short period the entire dynamic changed. You leave the house so you don't go to your room, you visit. I started talking more and listening to music with them. I really appreciated my parents more. I hope my relationship with my children will be the same.
What do you mean by listening to music with them? Like, sitting around in the living room playing each other's favorite songs? I don't think I've ever done that with my parents, my kids, or anyone really.
Listening to music with my young kids is a favorite. My wife and I also frequently invite other couples over to listen to vinyl and enjoy a cocktail or two.
We like vinyl just because it has the physicality to it but I think anything here is fine. It's the music and the shared experience.
this is nice to know as someone who is the adult child.
i used to argue a lot with my parents when i was still living with them, but ever since i moved out and we only see each other once every few months, our relationship has improved so much, and we're always happy to see each other in smaller doses
Many parents would gasp at this sentence, but the same parents would likely complain to anyone who'd listen about how negatively their children are affecting their lives.
I never enjoyed spending time with my late parents. I only did so out of a sense of obligation. I have no children and have never really given that choice a second thought.
Its interesting that people value their relationship with their children so much and I assume its due to a deep sense of connection with them, they being "flesh and blood" but I've never given that any weight. I feel much more connected to people who have had similar life experiences and ideas to myself, and that could be anyone. I have quite a few relatives who I've never met or met once and do not see because they are nothing like me.
I suspect this is mostly due to being pretty far out on the pointy bits of various bell curves.
I actually have long disagreed with this sentiment -- I know people who don't want and never want kids, and they seem to totally comprehend the kind of love I have for my children. I also remember being a teenager and always kind of understanding the depth of the love my parents had for me (as in knowing "they love me implicitly, and they'd die for me, and they wish me so much happiness", and all the other trappings that I'd use to describe it with my own kids).
Being able to feel that love directly is, of course, a different story that's probably indeed pretty unique.
I think it is more than that though. Parenthood is a long, multi-year process full of hormones, self-reflection, and fundamental changes to your psyche. A non-parent can intellectually understand what happens and why, can emotionally understand or feel that love by swapping out kids with partners, pets, etc. But I believe there is a level of understanding that is just not possible unless you also go through that process. Hard to describe. Closest analog I can think of right now is my perspective on pregnancy vs my wife's.
You have to do the journey as a parent. It's long. It's beyond intense. It's a million small victories. A thousand small tragedies. If you come out the other end with mutual admiration and love, the depth is beyond explanation.
One thing that surprised me as a parent is that watching kids grow up provides significant introspective reflection which is nourishing in a different kind of way.
It also depends on the parents and how they nurtured the relationship with the child as they grew up.
I had a a good relationship with mine growing up, and enjoyed visiting, talking and so on as I was an adult.
A good friend had it different. They were not good parents. He, much like you, visit out of obligation and not to get written out of the will quite frankly. If it was up to him he'd never see them again.
This means a great de-risking is happening for the costs of deploying somewhat autonomous agents. This has profound implications on the timeline of deployable personal agents. Cost was a significant factor for many people during the OpenClaw frenzy, specifically when they let their agents run somewhat wild.
It will become much more palatable, or already has, to install whatever the next generation of token consuming autonomous systems will be.
Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.
I was very into PC gaming during this era, and ran a decently sized gaming news website, and Carmacks use of .plan as a one-to-many microblog was really a decade or two ahead of what became mainstream twitter’s primary use case. None of the games I ‘covered’ had enough .plan activity by the developers to warrant an automated script, but I remember being really impressed by the sites that did it (usually id-centric ones like blues news or stomped I think?)
Such good memories. I think my whole career has been built around chasing the feeling I had when making that gaming site.
Did not get bought by OpenAI. Creator was hired by OpenAI and they sponsor the project with tokens. OpenClaw is a non-profit now.
The problem is really that the promise was so big but the management and implementation was so painful, coupled with non-stop updates, coupled with far too big of an implementation surface.
A classic "lets solve 15 problems at once" situation, but none of them really well.
YMMV but I think with the SOTA models building a token efficient engineering loop is absolutely doable with (imho) solid development and testing practices. I see no reason to buy a 3rd party system for this either. I'm not in enterprise so don't come at me here - I'm a small shop and I'm not trying to corral 100 devs or whatever.
We've got linear boards getting cards pushed and pulled, debated over by multiple models, coded, debated, tested, accepted, etc etc.
True software factories now exist and they don't screw up the login.
Small companies doing consulting certainly could. My use of the term "software factory" really implies a lot of automation in turning out useful tools for internal and external customers.
One area that I find really compelling and useful now is controlling hardware that I've struggled to use in the past, like the BlackMagic ATEM video switcher/controller. They are very powerful and can turn your space into an incredible video studio. The software that ships with them is probably appropriate for experienced video techs. The last time I setup a studio to run a webinar with one it took me a couple of days to get it working how I needed.
Yes, I love tinkering with hardware so there is that and I did enjoy figuring it out.
Today I had a webinar that needed to be setup quickly and thought it would just be a raw Zoom feed. Instead, within an hour, I had a full video switching system with embedded graphics, feeds from a laptop configured with live content, multiple cameras, etc and a custom html page specific just to todays webinar to drive it all.
I've used a number of 3rd party apps for the ATEM series. They all have to boil the ocean.
This kind of personalized project tech is the perfect software hole for llm's to fill.
My simple take: Hermes is for the less technical and is more polished. OpenClaw is deeper with more capabilities.
OpenClaw has come so far since its' original launch/craze. I recommend taking a second look if you haven't touched it in a while. If for no other reason than it's just a really fun playground with a LOT of areas to experiment in. Setup a myriad of agents with various models, skills, cron jobs, etc.
The control surfaces have come a long way as well.
Hermes is good fun, running that as well but feels like they focused on polish vs features in order to capitalize on the primitive state that OpenClaw was in for its first months.
People that got attracted to the hype of openclaw but couldn't endure the fast pace of breaking changes while they figured out the problem space were well served by going to Hermes.
About three weeks ago I was seduced by people singing praise to OpenClaw, and also by the fact that OpenClaw team burns millions of dollars of tokens per month on developing it — surely it must be good.
It turned out to be probably the crappiest, glitchiest piece of software I’ve used in the past few years. Its basic onboarding workflow was completely broken, GUI was a hallucinated mess.
Also it turned out that not a single person I know who dedicated time to configuring it, ever achieved anything remotely interesting as a result.
That was my experience a couple months ago, and until someone shows me real evidence of something valuable they've made with it, I'm not wasting my time on this stuff again.
My Mac Mini took so long to arrive that I never messed with OpenClaw/Hermes and just went straight to Claude CoWork w/ Dispatch from my phone. One of the biggest blessings in disguise I can remember.
I read /r/openclaw for ideas on automations and 95% of the content is complaints or people having it do things that just don't need to be done.
As a side question for anyone reading this, what are the best agentic AI subreddits for people who are actually using it for work and not just personal dashboards?
A friend of mine automated the lead generation and marketing function of his tiny startup using OpenClaw and set of skills he wrote for it. It would find potential leads (from a list of sources), contact them, score them and keep the owner informed via. Slack about what's going on. They actually closed a few deals following up on leads generated by their bots.
Yes. That is an insight but then again, most marketing emails were templatised slop1.0 from mailchimp and other sites. This just makes it slicker. So, I'm not sure.
I don't think I share your experience.
I've been using open claw for the past 3 months and it has some quirks but it works pretty well.
The web UI is not the nicest but it gets the job done and you rarely interact with it through that interface. You use telegram, WhatsApp, discord, etc.
The CLI install flow is one of the best I've seen. It really takes you through every single step to set everything up.
I've helped organized the Openclaw events in Dublin where we usually have 80 to 100 people come and we've seen great success with the install flow. Especially for non-technical people.
The biggest issue was with Windows and WSL but other than that no major problems. It's not perfect but it works pretty well.
I tried OpenClaw, but holy smokes, that project is bigger than Postrgres. All I want is a Pi session I can put on a server and load up with skills, that I can chat with over matrix.
To that end, I found this amazing project called OpenCrow. It's aggressively DM chat, and I wanted support for group chats (so it can be a household helper), so I forked* it and made it exactly what I want.
Now I actually have two personal agents, one just for me, and one for the household. They are each in their own container, and the whole thing is managed by my Nix* config.
This is a genuinely interesting project. Thanks for sharing it for what its worth, I think it fits my definition of minimalist for the most part.
Do you have anything for pi in general as well? I have currently tried out oh-my-pi and (well previously opencode) and I know about https://zot.sh for something completely in golang and also https://maki.sh/ both of which are created by another HN user.
I have found projects created by frequent HN users (in terms of how much they interact with the site) to be genuinely useful/interesting within this space as compared to complete hype. I might bet there to be a very significant overlap and thus, it might be a good filter for these AI projects.
Now aside from this one of the things that I want is I have found opencode + obra/superpowers to be a bit token intensive but its much more hands driven development and the AI doesn't completely go amok. I basically just want to replicate something like this either in pi or rust/golang alternative of it as well and then to use it completely with mobile phone as a means of interaction using say matrix protocol. (Optionally: I have glm 5.2 previous coding subscription where the rate limits is actually 5 hour rolling window rather than weekly so I would like to make it re-run/continue automatically after the 5 hour window on a project just continously to build on the side to use those tokens and just building something in an AFK fashion.)
This might be my ideal workflow, Given that Pi is extensible, I think that Opencrow/your fork of it can be useful in one of the pieces of this ideal workflow. I'd be genuinely curious as it wasn't until quite recently that I went from my minimalist model of defaults to customizations/skills.md and I am just dabbling on different levels of complexity to find out what makes the right sense of having complexity towards on.
I have my own little Claw running with Telegram Connect and a Gmail CLI npm package on a Raspberry Pi (3 is fast enough) and it's based on zot.sh (that thing is so damn fast and resource-efficient).
Dendritic flake! Love to see it. Curious though, if you just import the default.nix and the default.nix imports everything, why not just import everything in modules/ and hosts/?
Hmmm... not sure I understand. My setup recursively imports every default.nix in modules and hosts. About that... I don't have a really great defense. It's how the little template I started out with did it. :D I do like it though.
the usual practise when using flake-parts and import-tree is to forego the default.nix completely and just import the entire folder without needing to explicitly register each file in a default.nix. you can view an example at my flake here:
Oh! Yes, you're totally right. I remember going to a bit of trouble in the beginning to filter to default.nix, because yes, the template absolutely just imported everything. I must have had some good reason, but that reason is lost to time.
Not totally sure, but I feel like importing that wouldn't work. Probably you're supposed to put packages in their own place, I guess. But yeah, what I've got works. haha
Unrelated, but thanks for sharing your config! There are a lot of really good ideas in there, and I've only looked at a few files.
for packages you just wrap them in `perSystem` and prefix the methods with `pkgs.*`, for example: [1]
Also unrelated, how are you liking Jai? I was following it before it was released but haven't had the time to try it out - I've heard good things even beyond gamedev use cases
I've tried Nanoclaw and Openclaw and I found them both to be steaming piles of crap. Both of them broke in record time (less than about 1 week). And yes, I tried OpenClaw from scratch just ~3 weeks ago. The config pages made my brain melt and were buggy as hell. I've never dealt with something so frustrating that has so many people pretending it's the second coming of jesus.
I just want claude code accessible through Discord (or Telegram or anything, I don't care what).
While it's _far_ from what I really want, my best setup currently is Blink Shell on iOS -> Mosh to my computer -> Run Claude Code.
Everything you mentioned OpenClaw does is also something that Hermes supports. Hermes also supports project-scoped kanban boards and can orchestrate across multiple specialized Hermes profiles.
What are some examples of features that they have added since December that you use? I originally had setup openclaw back in Jan(?) and had it generating some news summaries for me and stuff. But ran out of ideas... would like to try it out again.
I really want to like these "agentic assistant" tools, because I feel like the problem they claim to solve is real: give me an interface across desktop and mobile to a persistent backend where I can set up agents (using natural language) to do... whatever I want. Deep market research? Building + hosting a browser game? Checking my email? etc.
But after trying both Hermes and OpenClaw, it feels like they both... miss the point? Last time I tried OpenClaw it wanted to download something like 11 GB of local models to do... something (embeddings for memory indexing or chat labeling/classification maybe?) which my sorry old 16gb M1 is certainly not capable of running.
Hermes seems to suffer from the same problem: why do I need to download (and then immediately disable to avoid confusing my poor "agents"... a concept which I also feel like way too many tools fundamentally misunderstand) skills for managing Spotify playlists or pokemon or minecraft in order to run the thing? (I acknowledge that they cleaned some of this up in a recent release, so maybe this isn't as bad as it was when I last tried it)
WRT "agents"... can someone explain to me why there's so much effort put into naming agents and giving them personalities? An "agent" is simply a separate context window with different prompting (itself written by the spawning/parent "agent") that's specific to a partial slice of the task you're trying to solve. If you have to write their prompt ahead of time that defeats the whole purpose of a programmable, autonomous subagent, doesn't it?
People want to think of their computers as a little dollhouse of AI running around doing stuff for them.
OpenClaw is just a toy. There is no use case for it and I haven’t heard of anyone do anything remotely interesting with it. People like to vaguely say it “manages” stuff for them, whatever that means.
Anything requiring serious automation can be automated deterministically via a script, probably written by an LLM.
If you want a coding agent, get a coding agent, you do not need OpenClaw.
What an enormous waste of money and effort (Actually, there’s no effort at all, it’s just AI slop running wild)
I tried to make mine as human-like as possible, with self-reflection, episodic memory / hippocampus, emotional tagging etc. If you prefer talking to a person, not a tool, you can take a look at https://lethe.gg/ (open source, written in Rust, hosted version available).
Sounds like an interesting project but the copywriting is not clear how the 20$ and using different models interact. Does the hosted version come with credits or a model included?
And is the only way to interact telegram? I see the simple appeal but why send everything through a russian app?
Russia would love for telegram to be Russian app, unfortunately for them, there is nothing to suggest that's the case as plenty of examples why it's not (one being that tg is banned in Russia)
Decades ago, Sid Meier's Pirates had a more realistic sailing model, which made you feel the difference between triangular and square sails, in a game where the player had a lot of other challenges to master. And Meier is a designer who always put fun and playability above realism.
He has heart in the right place but questionable methods
I guess nowadays anyone can support their skills with AI and make a game in weeks vs months so he should copy paste ur idea with his mechanics and see which one gets more popular. See who will win.
I get stuck when I try to post on social and my brain fills up with all the random people I know that have commented or complimented a post. The problem is there are wildly different expectations of what I post. Is anyone else dealing with this?
Lately I've decided to write for ME. What do I want to write about? That has made it a lot easier to get unstuck. That and not looking at the views, likes, etc.
The ability to connect to remote systems inside a local tui sounds fine but it's already a terrific remote solution! Try it out if you haven't!
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