Last night I did the thing you’re probably not supposed to do casually: I shut down my working OpenClaw setup and moved over to Hermes.
This started because I saw the
@NetworkChuck video about OpenClaw -> Hermes, got curious, watched a few more videos, and then ended up going down the rabbit hole on Hermes. One of the migration videos made me a little nervous, honestly. Not because the process looked impossible, but because this is one of those tools that slowly becomes part of how you work. Breaking it would be annoying.
So I took it carefully.
First step: full backup of my entire ~/.openclaw directory, including the projects sitting under the old OpenClaw workspace.
Then I ran the Hermes migration command.
The pleasant surprise was that my API keys and Telegram bot config came across cleanly enough that I could keep using the same bot, just backed by Hermes instead of OpenClaw.
The cleanup work was mostly what you’d expect:
- old paths like ~/.openclaw/workspace/projects needed to become ~/HermesWorkspace/projects
- a few tools had hardcoded assumptions that needed updating
- LaunchAgents needed path fixes
- one daily process needed adjustment
- a couple recurring workflows needed sanity checks
As of now, I’m about 99% migrated and using Hermes full time all day today.
I didn’t switch just because it was the next shiny thing. Hermes actually existed before OpenClaw, even though OpenClaw got more of the early attention. What pulled me in was Hermes’s self-improvement model, skill building, and the way it curates memory instead of just piling context into a junk drawer.
Also, on the same Mac, with the same GPT-5.5 model, Hermes feels faster and less bloated in actual use.
I wrote up the more technical version here:
joshie.com/migrating-from-op…
Short version: back up first, migrate second, then audit anything that still assumes ~/.openclaw exists.