What a Hermes agent is
Hermes is an open-source, autonomous agent: a persistent process you run that connects a model to your tools and acts on your behalf. It sits in the same category as OpenClaw, an agent that lives and does things, as opposed to a short-running sandbox or workflow that runs a single task and tears down.
Long-running, like OpenClaw
Hermes is a persistent agent, not an ephemeral task. The value, as with OpenClaw, is being a runtime rather than a scripted workflow: it reasons at each step and adapts when a tool changes, it is always available, and it rides an open ecosystem and community you are free to extend. Memory is not the point, a short-running agent can persist state too. The point is a general-purpose runtime the agent lives in, plus the flexibility, ecosystem and community behind OpenClaw and Hermes.
Short-running: sandboxes and workflows (E2B, BrowserUse, Modal)
Stateless. Re-hydrates state, re-auths and reconnects every time. Great for code execution, scraping and batch tasks.
Long-running: persistent agents (OpenClaw, Hermes)
Persistent. An agent that lives, remembers and takes initiative. The only catch is idle cost, which per-agent pricing or your own always-on infrastructure removes.
Running Hermes at scale
Any autonomous agent has the same operational problem: keeping it alive, recovering it when it crashes and keeping it from starving the agents next to it. Molted is runtime-agnostic, OpenClaw today and Hermes on request, with self-healing, managed integrations, a versioned filesystem, and managed or on-premise deployment. You run the agents, the runtime stays alive for you.
One agent
Easy to babysit.
A fleet, by hand