I was looking at models on OpenRouter some weeks ago, and just happened to glance at one model's usage breakdown graphs, and noticed that the first item on the list had a logo and a name I didn't recognize. It was Hermes Agent.

I was intrigued - the model in question was a big one, so I assumed Hermes Agent being the most used tool was a good indication that I need to get educated on what this Hermes thing is.

I did. I was intrigued. Mostly because it seemed like a spiritual successor to OpenClaw, but a little more tame. So, i got it set up on the managed Hermes hosting plan on Hostinger.

It felt good from the very beginning. Hostinger shipped a nice web GUI for it. I set it up with Gemini Flash 3.7. It felt fast and it felt smart. I threw some tasks at it, and watched it do stuff, remember facts, create cronjobs. It felt powerful, and I felt hopeful it was going to be the assistant for me.

Before long, I moved Hermes to my own Kubernetes cluster, and upgraded the model to GPT 5.6 Sol. I did it because I have trust issues with smaller models, and using GPT 5.6 Sol with XHigh reasoning effort made me confident that if Hermes Agent failed me, I couldn't blame the LLM being dumb. And I moved Hermes itself to my K8s because I wanted to run OpenViking and Browserless for it too, and didn't feel like routing that via the Internet into Hostinger.

It failed me today for the first time. I started a task i consider to be pretty big/broad - I asked it to research a Lilygo modem. Specifically - how to turn the modem board into a general purpose inbound/outbound call interface that would be compatible with Hermes Agent for placing and receiving calls and listening/responding in a live STT/TTS fashion.

Before any actionable research came back, something called a web search safeguard was triggered and entirely stopped the Hermes session. I asked what happened, and Hermes said it burned through free web search calls it had access to. It recommended me get a free Firecrawl token, saying that will be enough for forever basically.

I did just that and asked Hermes to configure the token and continue the task.

After a few minutes, I received two emails in short succession [1].

Apparently, what happened was the model spawned 4 subagents to research the various venues of the prompt, and all of them started searching the web wildly - about 50 web searches per second were recorded. That burned the free search venues. And then it proceeded to burn most of my free Firecrawl tokens. The model explained this to me, promised to remember to never to that again, and... the session stopped.

You may not call this a failure, but I do. What's it even mean to "remember to never again search the web very hard"? What if the task calls for it? I looked at what Hermes actually used Firecrawl for - a lot of retrieving individual GitHub raw files, downloading a large PDF, etc. It could have chosen to clone the repository it was retrieving a lot of files from. It could have used `curl` to download the PDF. But it didn't. And probably the even more frustrating part was that after promising never to search hard again, it just stopped the session.

GPT 5.6 Sol on XHigh is not a dumb model by any stretch of the imagination, and I will not be convinced otherwise. So where does that leave us? I don't remember Claude Code doing something like this for at least the last 6 months - ever since Opus 4.7 times I'd wager, and I use Claude Code a lot. But Opus and Fable are not that much smarter than 5.6 Sol, and my hunch is that it's all about the harness, and I think the boring conclusion is that Claude Code is just a more mature LLM harness than Hermes Agent is. And that's really all I want to conclude, I guess.

What inclines Claude Code not to overuse the search tool? What inclines it to clone a repo when it knows it'll query a lot of the files in it, rather than using the web_search tool a hundred times? I'd wager it's not Claude being smarter than GPT. I'd wager it's the system prompt. And the system prompt is part of the harness.

I guess Anthropic is offering the subscription and the tokens for Hermes Agent. They have a very big incentive to not have a fleet of angry users complain that their tokens were burned through by the harness being faulty. Same goes for tool calls like web_search, which I'm sure go through Anthropic's servers and are rate limited and not free for Anthropic itself in terms of resources.

So is there a different conclusion? Hermes Agent developers are not inherently inclined to save your tool quotas and tokens? That doesn't check out, because they do in fact provide tokens and premium tool APIs themselves [2]. If I was on the Hermes Plus plan, and this issue happened to burn through my premium web search allowance, I'd be angry, but I could probably complain and get my allowance reset, so that works, I guess.

But in the end, the point I'm trying to make is that Claude Code never failed me like this. Not recently, anyway. And it's a pretty big blow to my willingness to keep trying Hermes. In all likelihood, I'll keep using it for smaller tasks, such as planning my weeks, logging things i want to buy, etc. I mean, i did set it up with OpenViking and a Browserless, so it has the two most important tools it needs.

Ramble ramble.