ClawBox Hermes Edition runs Hermes Agent by Nous Research as the only agent on the box. It is the same hardware, the same setup wizard, the same desktop and the same update path as a standard ClawBox — the agent underneath is different, and a few surfaces change with it. If you are not sure which edition you have, see Editions.

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What ships

Hermes Agent

Installed at ~/.local/bin/hermes, with its own configuration in ~/.hermes. It backs the desktop chat, Telegram, and the device tools.

Hermes dashboard

Hermes’ own web interface, opened by the Hermes desktop icon. It sits behind your normal ClawBox login.

Hermes Skills

The Skills desktop app — the capability store for this edition.

ClawBox device tools

The agent operates the device through the ClawBox MCP server, same as on OpenClaw. The tool set is slightly different — see below.

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What is absent, on purpose

The OpenClaw gateway is not part of this edition. It is not installed, its systemd unit is stopped, disabled and masked, and the openclaw command does not exist on the box. Everything that depended on it is gone with it:
Do not try to start clawbox-gateway.service on a Hermes device. The unit is masked deliberately, nothing on this edition serves it, and re-enabling it puts the box in a state that support cannot reason about. Update through Settings → System Update, which does the right thing for the edition.

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The desktop

Everything else on the desktop is unchanged — Chat, Terminal, Files, Browser, VS Code, Remote Desktop, Settings, ClawKeep and any webapps. Two icons are specific to this edition:
  • Skills — the Hermes Skills store.
  • Hermes — the Hermes dashboard. It opens through an authenticated proxy on port 8090, using the ClawBox session you already have, so you do not log in twice. The dashboard itself never leaves the device’s own loopback interface.
Use the dashboard when you want a Hermes feature ClawBox does not surface — the full provider registry, for instance. The everyday paths (chat, models, providers, skills, Telegram) are all in the ClawBox UI.

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Chat

The desktop chat and Telegram both talk to Hermes. Message-by-message you can change:
  • Provider and model — the pills in the chat header.
  • Reasoning effort — the brain icon, eight levels from None to Ultra. This is a per-conversation override; the device default lives in Hermes’ own configuration. Providers that do not accept a reasoning level — including the on-device model — simply do not show the control.
Setting the device’s default provider and model is a Settings job — see AI Providers on Hermes.

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Telegram

Telegram works the way it does on any ClawBox: connect a bot token in Settings, then approve each sender from the pairing request that appears. Underneath, Hermes runs its own gateway process and its own pairing store, so a bot token saved on an OpenClaw device is not the same record as one saved here. If you migrate a device by reflashing, re-enter the token.

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What the agent can do

The agent operates the device through the ClawBox MCP server, exactly as on an OpenClaw box. A tool that cannot work on the running edition is not registered at all, so the differences are visible to the agent rather than being failures it discovers at call time. “Everything else” is the bulk of it: device status and stats, power, disk, logs, screen capture, Wi-Fi, backups, Telegram status, preferences, opening and listing desktop apps, notifications, webapps, code projects, and browser_open/navigate/screenshot/close. The full catalogue is on the Agent Interface page.

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Updating

Same as any ClawBox: Settings → System Update. Updates keep the edition — the installer reads the edition lock on every run and skips every OpenClaw step on this SKU. If an update ever leaves the Hermes side half-provisioned, the installer says so and prints the one command that repairs it:
That step is idempotent and safe to re-run.