Guides·Guide
An open-source long-running agent in the same category as OpenClaw: persistent, ecosystem-driven, and built to act, not just answer.
TL;DR
Hermes is an open-source AI agent in the long-running category, like OpenClaw: a runtime you run that reasons and acts across your tools, not an ephemeral task that spins up and disappears.
Hermes is an open-source, long-running 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.
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 over-provisioning or your own always-on infrastructure removes.
Any long-running agent has the same operational problem: keeping it alive, recovering it when it crashes, and packing many safely on shared capacity. 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
Q.01
An open-source, long-running autonomous agent: a persistent process you run that acts across your tools, in the same category as OpenClaw, rather than an ephemeral sandbox task.
Q.02
They are different open-source projects in the same long-running agent category. Both are persistent agents you can self-host and extend. The choice is yours; the operational challenge of running them at scale is the same.
Q.03
Molted is runtime-agnostic. It runs OpenClaw today and supports other runtimes like Hermes on request, with self-healing, integrations and managed or on-premise deployment.
Q.04
Yes. Hermes is an open-source AI agent framework in the long-running category, like OpenClaw: a runtime you run that reasons, orchestrates and acts across your tools. The hard part is running Hermes agents reliably at scale, which is what managed hosting handles. Molted is runtime-agnostic: OpenClaw today, Hermes on request.