Hermes just released their biggest update ever (Hermes Bot)

0:00 Hermes just released a massive new update and it's the biggest facelift to Hermes agent ever. It adds Hermes bot mode which completely changes the way you use Hermes. It's a direct copy of Grockbot but with some Hermes specialties and surprises mixed in. In this video, I'll cover everything Hermes new bot mode, show you how to use it, and let you know if you should be ripping out Grobbot for Hermes bot. Now, let's lock in and get into it. So, this is Hermes Bot. This is their brand new mode they just released. This is a direct ripoff, and I don't think they're really hiding it, of Grockbot, the brand new AI agent that's taken the entire AI world by storm over the last week. So, for those who don't know, Grockbot comes out a week ago. Everyone's talking about it. It's this brand new user experience built around having multiple agents work for you. Each agent has its own name, its own title, its own description, and you basically treat this experience like an iMessage where you send messages to all your different bots with their different responsibilities to get them work. Each agent has their own tools.

1:10 Each agent has their own skill sets. Each agent even has their own computer they use. And it's just a completely different way of interact with AI agents. Typically, every other AI agent looked very much like Hermes, right? where you have one agent you talk to but many different sessions. This is how OpenClaw worked. This is how Chai GPT. This is how Claude works. But Grock threw everything on its head. Said, "No, we want you to actually have as many agents as you want. All with different roles and responsibilities." This felt to me and many others a much more polished, organized, kind of natural, simple, and most importantly kind of fun way to interact with AI agents. I love opening up my phone and deciding, okay, should I talk to Dusty, Barry, Cindy?

1:55 And I felt like I just had these like team of agents inside my pocket, which was just a ton of fun. Well, Hermes agent was quick to notice all the people loving Grockbot. And so today, they released Hermes bot mode, which if you look in the desktop app, this is for the desktop app only, and you go to bots there, you now have your bot mode. You need to be in the latest version of Hermes to get this bot mode. Now, that's not the only thing Hermesbot directly copied from Grockbot. One of the things Grockbot implemented front and center and really revolutionized in a way was agent-to-ag communication. When you talk to any of your agents in Grockbot, you'll see this a lot. Messaged and then the other agent. Grock put extra emphasis in their bot here for the agents to actually talk to each other and reach out to each other without you even having to ask. This allows different agents to share context and information to each other. And this is a great update. This is makes the experience using AI really, really amazing. It allows your agents to delegate, allows your agents to ask each other questions. It makes it so you don't have to share context in between all the agents. They kind of just do it automatically and it just feels very lively. Well, Hermes copied that as well. That's in here as well. And for the record, when I say copy, I don't mean that in like a derogatory way. This is the age of AI. Software is no longer a moat. If your competitor is doing something better than you, you should copy it. I'm not doing this to like crap on Hermes. Hermes has been my favorite AI tool for months and months and months now. I do not blame them for just straight up copy pasting all these features. You should be doing that.

3:30 Software is no longer a mode. There's nothing wrong with copying. So, let's dive into Hermes bot mode first. I'll take you through it. I'll give you a tour. I'll show you how it works. Then I'll compare it directly with Grockbot, show you all the kind of little nuances and differences. I'll then go through my workflow. Did I rip out Hermes? Did I rip out Grockbot? Which one I'm using the most? And then I'll give my recommendation to you on what I think you should be doing and which tool you should be using. So starting off with this new bot mode inside of Hermes, what you can see here is over on the left hand side are your bots. What are Hermes bots? Well, this isn't a new concept inside Hermes. These are actually your profiles inside Hermes. If you look at your kind of classic session mode in Hermes, this was your default experience before. If you look in the bottom left, you can see all your profiles already there. Hermes profiles are basically just separate Hermes agents. They have their own descriptions, names, tools, skill sets, cron jobs, much like the bots in Grock. All Hermes did was now reorganize that user experience so that those profiles live on the lefthand side and it's just one single chat with each.

4:42 So you have your agents over on the lefth hand side. You have your chat in the middle. You have your one chat. You can open up new chats with each agent up here in the different tabs. And over on the right hand side you have your crown jobs which in Rockbots the routines. These are just your scheduled tasks. It looks pretty much the same because it is pretty much the same. The main difference though being you get all your Hermes features that made it great in this new bot mode. So if you go in and you actually set up a new agent or new profile, you can go in, you can name it, give a tile description just like Grock, I mean this is as big of a ripoff in copy as it possibly gets. It's literally the same exact logos, but that's fine.

5:23 Whatever. But because it's Hermes, you can choose your provider. You can choose whatever model you want. You can change the personality. That's not really something you can do in Grockbot. Way more customization in here. Now, if that is a positive thing or a negative thing, that's totally up to you. I think for power users like myself, like probably most of the people that watch this channel, that's probably a positive thing. It's a positive thing. You can go in and choose whatever model you want.

5:48 If you're anything like me, you have subscriptions with Chad GBT, with Claude, with other providers. Now, you can make agents for each one of those different providers. For the average person, probably for like 80% of people out there, this is probably a negative. They probably want the Grockbot experience, which is you don't choose models, you don't choose providers, you don't sign in with OOTH for a 100 different companies. You just install it and it works. We kind of forget here in this kind of AI bubble that the way we work is not really how the normies out there work. Most people don't want to think about the differences between Chad GBT 56 soul and Claude Opus and Claude Fable and Quentyn and this and that.

6:31 They just want to turn on a product and have it work. So I think for 80% of people this is probably a better experience. But if you're a power user, you have a bunch of subscriptions, you can now do that. Hermes, this is not something you can do in Grockbot. You can't use chat GBT or other providers. Grockbot, it's only the Grock model. So you set that up, you choose your model and your agent will show up on the lefth hand side. And because Hermes is so customizable, you can do things like I did like have this Herald agent here.

6:58 What is Herold? Herold is Quen 3827B running on my 5090, my RTX 5090 gaming computer. So this is an agent running on a local model, right? Unlimited usage, very fast, very smart. Can't do that in Gro Gro. Again, only Grock models. From there, you get all the different Hermes bells and whistles. They have the voice mode, which is kind of the copy of the Chad GBT voice. Not quite as good as Chad GBT voice, but usable. Then you have built-in Git, which is really nice.

7:27 Although, I'm sure Grockbot will build in Cursor Origin, which is the new cursor Git product very soon, but no Git integrations at the moment there. And then all your other bells and whistles. I you get a hundred different ways to customize this in Hermes. I think probably like 95% of people watching this video, 95% of people who just use Hermes overall didn't have multiple profiles before. They probably just treated it like one single agent. And that's totally fine. You probably want to go through the same setup with Hermes new bot mode that I did with Grockbot mode, which is the brain dump to reverse prompt. For those who don't know what that is, I described in my last Grockbot video. That's going in explaining everything about yourself to this new bot mode inside Hermes. And then you do a reverse prompt based on what you know about me. Which Hermes bot would you set up? And then you hit enter. And now your Hermes bot will give you recommendations for which bots you set up. Should you set up a developer bot, a marketing bot, a copyright bot? and it'll just set it up for you, which is what I think is the best way to work with this new bot mode.

8:40 From there, you can work with the bots however you want. If you want to work with your developer bot, you go to your developer bot. If you want to work with your main bot, you can work with your main bot. Now, there are some downsides here. The agentto agent communication inside Hermes is not nearly as good as Grockbot. For instance, when I went in here and I told my main orchestrator, Hermes agent, to assign some work to Harold, I said, "Hey, can you assign to Harold this research task of researching MU and tell me what kind of modes the company has?" It asked Harold to do the work, but then it delivered the results to me, right? It I went into Harold.

9:16 Harold wasn't even really aware it got that work assigned to it. So it doesn't even really make it that obvious that it's actually assigning the work to different people. When you're in Grockbot and you assign work, it actually like gives the work to the other bots and you can watch the other bots receive the work and actually do the work. So the agentto agent communication, the orchestration is clearly was just kind of tacked on and vibe coded over the last week. I'm sure it will improve. I'd say the Grockbot approach is almost like the Apple approach to things though where yes, it came in a little bit later, but it was done extremely well, extremely thought out and just works. It just works really, really well. Nothing seems tacked on. Nothing seems like an experiment. Everything seems very intentional. With Hermes in their new bot mode, it seems very much like they saw, oh, Rockbot's doing this. Let's add it in. And it seems a little bit tacked on. Although again, I'm sure things will improve. Another big difference, and this might be a positive for you, this might be a negative for you, but there is no built-in cloud computers to any of these agents, right? A really nice and great part of Grockbot, which I I'm going to be honest, I'm surprised by. I didn't think I'd like this is that every agent has their own virtual computer, right? Hermes, by default, the default way they work is they do the work on your computer. So you say do this, do that. It'll open up the browser on your computer. It'll click here. It'll do everything locally on your computer.

10:42 With Grockbot, it's the opposite. Each agent has their own built-in virtual computer they do work on with their own browser, their own terminal, their own everything. So when you say do task A, task B, task C, whatever, it does it in its virtual computer by default. I honestly didn't expect to like this experience. I kind of went in thinking, "Oh, I just want it all done locally like I've been doing with Hermes for months now." I actually like this experience more and there's a good reason behind that. It naturally puts very good separation between your agents and your personal private accounts. So for instance, when I tell my Hermes bots to do things, it'll open it up and if my accounts are logged in, it'll do things in my personal private accounts, which is sometimes pretty risky. But with Grobbot, when you tell it to do things, it doesn't do anything unless you give it its own account in its virtual computer. And so you can either log into your own personal accounts if that's something you want, or you can use agent mail, which is what I've been doing, which is just a free email service for these bots, and it creates its own accounts for everything, which gives really good separation. You never have to worry about your bots going in and doing anything in your personal accounts, which has been great. So for me personally, I'd actually think that's a negative. you know, they they do have plugins. You can use third-party tools to give bots virtual computers.

12:00 But again, that's kind of the strength of Grockbot, which is kind of the Apple way of doing things, which is it just works out of the box. It's all made around this very opinionated single workflow. Yes, you can put in virtual machines to your Hermes agents, but they're just kind of tacked on, not as natural, and require a ton of setup. I will say this though, I do like this Hermy bot mode a lot more. This is now my default way to use Hermes agent. I think this setup of having your different bots, your different profiles, your different names, your different titles, responsibilities all in a list and just messaging them separately is a superior way to use AI agents. And there's one big reason for that. When you talk to an AI agent, Hermes, OpenClaw, Chat, GBT, Claude Code, whatever, every prompt you send includes many different things in the background.

12:52 System prompts, skills, tools, MCPS, plugins, chat history, the name of the bot, and a whole lot of other things. The more of this context that's included with every prompt, the stupider the bot gets, the slower the bot gets, the more expensive the bot gets. Because the LLM has to process each and every one of these things. When you lighten up the context and you talk to a bot that doesn't have many tools, MCPs, all that, it acts much faster and much smarter.

13:20 The more bloated your context is, the stupider and slower your bot will be. So, when you have one single massive agent you talk to, like most people do with Hermes or Open Claw, you're including your entire agent's history, all the skills you use, all the tools you use, all the MCPs you use with every single prompt. Which is why a lot of these agents feel much stupider after like a month of use. But when you use bot mode, whether it's Grockbot or Hermes bot, you are splitting up responsibilities from one bot to many, many bots. Each bot with their own system prompt, their own tools, their own context, their own chat history. So if you have one bot that does a hundred things rather than a 100 bots that do one thing, those hundred bots that do one thing will do that one thing way better because it's going to have way less context with every single prompt you send. So, this is just inherently a better way to do work with AI agents because the prompts you're sending have way less bloat and way less context with each one. So, this is just a better way to work overall. So, that's why the Hermes bot will be my new default way of using Hermes. And I still think there's a lot of use to Hermes. I still use Hermes for a lot of different things, right? I have my own AI lab. If you watch my past videos, you know I have like 20 different computers in my room right now, right? I run a whole bunch of local models. I have two Hermes agents right now powered by local models.

14:48 Harold, which is Quen 38 on my 5090. Quen, which is another Quen running on my DGX Spark. I can't do that in Grockbot, right? I can't do that. Grockbot only uses Grock models, which has prices and limitations on it. I have no price. I have no limitations on these two Hermes agents. That's great. That's amazing. I use the local models for a lot of things. Hermes Agent is also just way better overall for doing local work on your computer. If I have to tinker with things on my computer, I have to move files around, if I edit things on my computer, Hermes Agent is just better at that. So that's why I'm still using Hermes Agent in this new bot mode. But is it replacing Grockbot for me? Well, the answer is no. Grockbot is what I think the smoothest, simplest, most straightforward, best way to do knowledge work with an AI agent right now. It does several things just better and easier than Hermes agent. Even in the new bot mode, the agentto agent communication's excellent. You can click it, you can see their chats with each other. It just works. It delegates tasks very, very well. The builtin virtual machine just makes the work the agents do so much simpler and easier. They do it in their own computer. I don't have to worry about them clicking around my computer, opening up my accounts, doing anything strange. They do everything in their own computer which is really really nice. And it's just a simpler, easier experience. There's no bloat.

16:11 There's no hundred things to configure. There's no drop downs. You just open up an agent. You give it tasks and it does it. It's as simple and easy as an experience as humanly possible. On top of that, and this might be the biggest reason of them all, it has a spectacular mobile app. The Grockbot mobile app is absolutely spectacular. It's simple. It feels like iMessage. It works really, really well. It's really well ironed out. The cursor team did an amazing job on building the mobile app. There is no Hermes mobile app. There's none. So, this bot mode, it just doesn't work on mobile. It there's no Hermes mobile app at all. So, this bot mode is only for desktop, which is a massive massive negative. I do tons of work on the go in Grobbot. You know, being able to message my bots on the go, individual bots when I need work done. I found out Quen 38 released while I was on the go, while I was at the gym. I opened up Grockpot on my phone. I I messaged build, which is my kind of network administrator. I said, "Build, go on my 5090, install Quen." I get back to my apartment. Quen's all loaded to go on my computer. Amazing. Wouldn't wouldn't have been able to do that with Hermes.

17:17 So, Grockbot is still my daily driver. So, what does that mean for you? What's my recommendation for you? Well, there is a big negative of Grockbot we haven't talked about too much here, which is pricing. Grockbot is only available on the $300 a month Grock plan, which is the most expensive AI subscription right now of any company, or the $200 cursor plan. That is really expensive, right? For a lot of people, that's actually out of budget. Now, I will say this, I personally believe I've gotten way more than $300 of value out of Grockbot. It has saved me a tremendous amount of time. I've definitely gotten ROI from that money.

17:57 But for a lot of people who are newer to AI, maybe they won't get that ROI right away. With Hermes, you can use like free models. The New Research, the company behind Hermes, has like their own like model router and they have like free models they give away. So you can technically use Hermes for free. So for most people are on tight budgets, Hermes is going to be a better option. But I will say this, I highly recommend people spend more money in AI because I think there's a very distinct ROI case to be made with AI, especially super powerful AI agents like this. And I'd recommend you do check out Grockbot, even if it's for a month, because I do think you will get your money's worth from it. I also think if you're not a super power user, Grockbot's probably the way to go as well. Much simpler interface. You don't have to switch between models for every single thing. You have to switch between reasoning levels. It just works out of the box, which might be the first AI tool in history to just work out of the box. I do think it's like the best user experience of any AI tool ever. If you are a power user, you definitely still want a Hermes agent to complement your Grockbot, right? I still even if you are a power user, I still think Grockbot is the best way to just get knowledge work done because of the mobile app, because of the virtual computers. If you need tasks to get done quickly, I think Grockbot's the best way to do it. But Hermes agent for those kind of edge power use cases, I think you still need a backup Hermes agent, especially if you have local AI. If that's something important to you, you do still need a Hermes agent. Hardcore vibe coding, I'm not going with either of these to be honest with you. If you're a hardcore vibe coder, the Chad GBT desktop app is great for hardcore vibe coding. When I get deep into a vibe coding session and I'm building out the app I raise money for, Henry intelligent machine, I'm in the Chad GBT desktop app, right?

19:45 There's still no great Git integration with Grockbot. You know, there is a Git integration with Hermes, but from a UI perspective, I think it's built more for general knowledge work rather than hardcore vibe coding. So, I'm still using like the codeex app to do hardcore vibe coding. But for general knowledge work, day-to-day things, I'm liking Grockbot the most right now. But, I do think they serve different purposes. Hermes Agent and Grockbot. I don't think it's binary one or the other. It's only one or the other. If you don't want to spend $200 a month on Grockbot, then it is one or the other. But if you have the money to spend, which I think people should be investing in AI because I think the ROI is there, then I do like Rockbot the most for general work. But I will be using Hermes bot mode as my kind of default Hermes experience moving forward. I have my kind of general Hermes agent, my local Hermes agent. I have my developer Hermes agent and a couple other research agents I built.

20:42 That's the main work I'm doing right now inside Hermes Agent. But I highly recommend you go in, you get the new update, you get the bot mode, you do the brain dump to the reverse prompt I talked about to get the setup nice and dialed in and you use it out and see how this fits in your own workflows and use cases. Just from a concern perspective when it comes to Hermes agent, I mean clearly this was just something they added on because they saw Grobbot succeeding. They are a smaller team. I am concerned if they're just going to add on every single feature and user experience that every other AI agent makes, they will kind of dilute their experience a little bit. I'd kind of prefer them kind of have a singular vision and stick to that vision rather than just adding on every single thing other companies do. But we'll see how it plays out. The team is great. I've talked to them before. They're a spectacular team. I'm sure they know what they're doing. It is just kind of funny just a few days after comes out, they just tack this on. But it is what it is. It's a better experience. It's such an exciting time to be in AI. I'm sure one month from now, neither of these apps will look anything like they look now. The space moves so freaking fast. It's amazing to watch. I'm going to do live boot camp this week on both Grockbot and Hermesbot in the Vibe Coding Academy. Link for the Vibe Coding Academy is down below. It's the number one community in AI on the entire internet. Make sure to join. Best decision you'll ever make. Subscribe and turn on notifications because all I do is make amazing videos about AI. Leave a like if you learned anything at all and let me know down in the comments what you want to see a video on next. You want me to do deeper dive into Hermes bot, deeper dive into Grockbot?

22:15 Whichever one gets most votes, that'll be the video I make. Let me know down below. I am so grateful you'd stick around and watch this video. Thank you so much for watching channel. I hope you had a little fun. I hope you learned something and I'll see you in the next