OpenClaw

the memory just… drifts. Had it handling a simple multi-step task and it straight-up forgot a key detail from the same conversation 20 minutes earlier.

Bottom line: Hermes won. It offers a better experience because it has strong community support.

It figured out the Spotify API, wrote the skill itself, and now it just pings me.

On day 2 it tried to send an email on my behalf that I hadn't approved.

Report #144788 is a critical regression naming 9.4 directly: post-agent-end memory generation fails for affected plugin setups that worked on 9.1 through 9.3.

The old runtime then fails Doctor because it expects workspace_dir while the database now has owner_agent_id. You end up on 9.2 with 9.3-shaped data, which is the worst of both worlds.

setting it up via the terminal without a traditional graphical user interface can make you want to throw your router out the window.

Best if you want control and will own the setup. Not a consumer app.

For me, this migration had already started slowly, with experiments here and there, but got a decisive acceleration when I tried Grok Bot this month.

my first live memory task returned an authentication error after about 25 seconds.

It is less suitable for people who simply want a polished one-click chatbot.

Hermes is the agent I switched to after I found OpenClaw too unreliable.

OpenClaw is a legitimately capable open-source autonomous agent framework with real coding strengths, an impressive community ecosystem, and some security considerations that developers absolutely need to understand before running it anywhere that matters.

In January 2026, security researchers disclosed CVE-2026-25253, a cross-site WebSocket hijacking vulnerability rated CVSS 8.8. The vulnerability meant that any website could steal an auth token and achieve remote code execution on the host machine through a single malicious link.

In February 2026, the ClawHavoc supply chain attack resulted in 341 malicious skills being uploaded to ClawHub, compromising over 9,000 installations with credential-stealing malware.

The short version: OpenClaw is powerful enough that I now treat it as infrastructure. It is also still rough enough that you need patience, logs, backups and a willingness to debug weird edge cases.

After roughly 3 month, I would not remove OpenClaw from my setup. It has crossed the line from experiment to daily infrastructure.