I'll be honest: for a long time I was deeply skeptical of anything that looked even remotely like a claw. After watching the whole open-claw drama go down, my gut reaction to "autonomous agent" was some mix of privacy nightmare and scam. I wasn't in a hurry to hand a black box the keys to my machine.
So I surprised myself by coming around on Hermes.
What changed my mind
I gave it an actual job. I have an old Windows computer sitting around, and I wanted to turn it into a little home lab — somewhere to keep my music files and stand up self-hosted alternatives to Google Drive and Google Photos. That's exactly the kind of fiddly, multi-step project that's miserable to do in one sitting and easy to lose the thread on halfway through.
Having something I could actually talk to about that machine — that could pick up where we left off instead of starting from zero every session — turned out to be genuinely useful.
Talking to something that remembers
The part I keep thinking about isn't any single task. It's the shape of the interaction: a persistent, session-based agent that carries context forward. A memory agent, if you want a name for it.
That's a different experience from a one-shot chatbot. It's less "answer this question" and more "help me manage this ongoing thing." And once you feel that difference, the appeal clicks.
Where I've landed
Still skeptical by default — I don't think the privacy concerns were wrong, and I still want to know what a thing is doing before I let it loose. But I get it now. Pointed at the right problem, with the right boundaries, a persistent agent is a genuinely interesting way to work.
(Curious about Hermes itself? The details are on the official site — this post is about my experience with it, not a spec sheet.)