Just putting this out there for those considering or already using Openclaw with their HA... After hearing about it on the Moonshots podcast (which is amaaazing), I upgraded to Hermes, and it's a world of difference. Faster, much better memory management and just generally more capable, even using the same LLM on the back end. xAI also blessed (on X) that you can use OAuth with a SuperGrok account if you're using Hermes; this has NOT been mentioned re: Openclaw, so you still risk being banned even if you can figure it out. Booyah capped inference!
With that said, I still use my Claude API for harder tasks... Grok 4.3 beta closed the gap but is still not equivalent.
As with Openclaw, Hermes works beautifully with HA using the built-in MCP server (though I know there are other ways). My favorite automation so far is that if HA sees rain coming, it asks Hermes to grab a snapshot from my deck camera which analyzes it to see if the rain covers are on the furniture. If they aren't, Hermes fires an HA script that sends me a notification and announces it over the HomePods in my place.
Now I just need the robot to go out there and cover them up...
Nice. I've switched to Hermes from OpenClaw. OC was just too unstable.
How did you get HA to talk to a Hermes agent?
Using HA's built-in MCP server. You turn it on, generate a long-lived access token for your agent, and point it at port 9583. Your agent can handle the rest. Takes a few minutes.
The MCP server exposes a list of entities (which includes scripts) and Hermes can act on them, including things like level of light brightness, camera access (if you allow it), running scripts, etc. The fun thing is that HA can ask Hermes things through automations and Hermes can take action based on the answer.
I keep almost all of the automation on the HA side to save on tokens, but I'm sure there are cool creative things we'll think of on the Hermes side.