Review/Critique: Hermes Desktop

Hermes Desktop TL;DR at bottom I was scrolling through my GitHub feed a couple days ago and stumbled upon a cool-looking OSS tool called Hermes. It's marketed as "The agent that grows with you." Furthermore, I remembered seeing it mentioned in other places as well - Twitter, YouTube... First Impressions Anyways, I went ahead and downloaded the Hermes desktop app on my Mac. Initially, I had downloaded the wrong app. After a bit of tinkering, I realized what I had done and fixed it. Here were my initial impressions: UI is great. The app itself is extremely buggy. A few examples: Many models missing on OpenRouter, no way to add. All inline "thinking" sections opened up whenever one was active. Dictation wouldn't work. And a lot more. Not many customization options. I don't know why they decided to make their own app completely ground up instead of forking an existing AI agent app (t3code, OpenChamber). All that being said, the UI and UX weren't the reason I installed this app in the first place. It was the promise of an agent that "grows with me." I couldn't think of any use cases off the top of my head (which is why I've never installed things like OpenClaw). Daily Briefs Crawling the internet, I found one case that appealed to me: daily briefs in Obsidian. Recently, I've started using it to manage my notes as well as for journaling, and I saw a couple of cool systems people have set up with "daily briefs". To put it simply, the AI agent makes you a .md file every morning about tasks, calendar events, weather, or pretty much anything you can find in your notes or on the web. Hermes set up this skill for me. It was buggy but useful. The cron job almost never worked, because it always hit some stupid OpenAI rate limits on my API key (never hit them before on OpenCode and other wrappers). I constantly have to nudge it "keep going." The daily briefs are great, though. Why I'm No Longer Using It The theory is great, but there are so many better options with much more polish. I could achieve 95% of the functionality with Cursor (I have the free deal for Students), Claude Code, Codex, or even OpenCode. To be frank, I don't understand all the hype with this tool, and don't see how it earned the 191,000 stars on GitHub. Perhaps I'm missing something huge. But from my end, it doesn't seem like something worth using. Thanks for reading! TL;DR Hermes as an app is promising, but in practice it was underwhelming. I really don't see what it has to offer that Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, etc don't already have.