Open-source harnesses Hermes and OpenClaw pivot to enterprise as consumer agents lose ground
The author argues Hermes and OpenClaw have given up on consumer personal assistants and are moving to enterprise tech layers and coding/science frameworks, since Grok Bot, Instinct, Muse and Dots took the mainstream users.
Putting down some thoughts on what seems to be happening to the open-source harnesses, guys. 1. I found it weird that Hermes published an index showing the best models to use in their harness, and told their users, who according to OpenRouter largely use cheaper models, that they are doing it wrong. Barely any of these models make it to their index. 2. But then the index has Terminal-Bench Science and Terminal-Bench. I found this strange, because a general/personal agents harness is evaling itself on science and code benchmarks. 3. My back and forth with one of the cofounders made me realize where their heads are at. He has since written a post to break up with the personal agents positioning they fought hard to win from OpenClaw. 4. This sums it up: "Dumb Normies". OpenClaw launched the first agent harness. It's long forgotten because of how un-normie friendly it was. Hermes took over, but is largely being abandoned just like OpenClaw, because easier products with better UX showed up, i.e. Grok Bot, Instinct, Muse, Dots, etc. 5. It seems the open-source harnesses like OpenClaw and Hermes feel they have lost the consumer opportunity, or that they have no chance of winning it. 6. OpenClaw launched an Enterprise beta, clearly positioning itself as a technical agent layer for enterprise. I called this 4/5 months ago when I was in the community team, Hermes was beating our ass and Peter was making even weirder moves. I said to the team then that OpenClaw feels it has lost, so it's positioning for enterprise. 7. Now it's Hermes' turn to position away from general agent to specialized harness, in their case coding and science. Sad to see them give up on consumer, but I guess they have to make money somehow, so this makes sense. 8. But it's not obvious even that they will win those. @clairevo is a power user and she's since dumped OpenClaw/Hermes. 9. I still think open-source consumer/personal/general agent harnesses need to exist. I'm still a big fan of OpenClaw/Hermes, but I can see Grok Bot, Muse and Dot pulling me away, largely because of the UX. 10. @kunchenguid wrote some days back that we still need an open general agent harness. Seems we need new OSS companies, since the 2 flag bearers have given up. (https://x.com/kunchenguid/status/2106612888987443424?s=20)
This post quotes another post: x.com/teknium/status/2107706829912543623