I really want to like these "agentic assistant" tools, because I feel like the problem they claim to solve is real: give me an interface across desktop and mobile to a persistent backend where I can set up agents (using natural language) to do... whatever I want. Deep market research? Building + hosting a browser game? Checking my email? etc.

But after trying both Hermes and OpenClaw, it feels like they both... miss the point? Last time I tried OpenClaw it wanted to download something like 11 GB of local models to do... something (embeddings for memory indexing or chat labeling/classification maybe?) which my sorry old 16gb M1 is certainly not capable of running.

Hermes seems to suffer from the same problem: why do I need to download (and then immediately disable to avoid confusing my poor "agents"... a concept which I also feel like way too many tools fundamentally misunderstand) skills for managing Spotify playlists or pokemon or minecraft in order to run the thing? (I acknowledge that they cleaned some of this up in a recent release, so maybe this isn't as bad as it was when I last tried it)

WRT "agents"... can someone explain to me why there's so much effort put into naming agents and giving them personalities? An "agent" is simply a separate context window with different prompting (itself written by the spawning/parent "agent") that's specific to a partial slice of the task you're trying to solve. If you have to write their prompt ahead of time that defeats the whole purpose of a programmable, autonomous subagent, doesn't it?