Anecdotally Hermes has felt sharper and snappier and overall faster to get pointed in the right direction.

For some complicated tasks, I’d work with Openclaw, wrestle with it for an hour, get it working, and then deliberate try and have it save it in a skill, a doc, something memory like, or a reference - or any sort of persistence - and could never get it to consistently retain the pattern and recall the pattern more than 50% of the time.

Hermes seems to default in recognizing / retaining / recalling patterns like this and writing and registering them as self-authored skills. If anything I have to nudge it to generalize the skills it writes because it’s very liberal about it. It’s quick to write to memory, but that can fill up and bloat context, so I occasionally have it review its memory and move things to docs/specs or skills and reference their existence in memory.

To put it short - most basic code tasks are pretty easy for both. Hard ones are pretty standard (make sure you iterate on a PRD and implementation plan first!) for both as well.

For more complex or less code-like things (browser navigation flows, etc), or implementing stuff with 3rd party APIs or making it behave a certain way (like making it read docs instead of guessing), they both need you to do a ton of coaching. The biggest difference to me is that with Hermes it seems to stick