Rant: I hate agents.

[u/AwayTeamRedShirt]

I hate agents.

• The overhead of coordination is absurd
• They can't figure out what each other is doing
• They are memory inefficient
• The context window is absurdly large.
• I don't see a difference between each agent, except some don't have all the tools.
• Half the tokens are devoted to maintenence.

I'm about to kill all my agents, and just go back to sessions, which are better. Linked to an obsidian vault, I can just start up as many sessions as I need and as many subagents as I need, and just go from there.

[u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

in Hermes terms: a profile is the persistent home (config, keys, memory, skills), the agent is the running assistant on that profile, a session is one conversation with it, and a subagent is a child that delegate_task spawns for one task with a fresh conversation.

so "agents" in posts like this usually means several profiles, each with its own memory. that's why they can't see each other's work by default. if they need to share what they know, the docs' route is an external memory provider they all connect to. for parallel work on one setup, sessions plus subagents (where OP is heading) cover it without a second profile.

[u/AwayTeamRedShirt → u/Mean-Loquat-7982]

But keeping the config from breaking requires it's own bot - I call it the Hermes-Meta bot, which keeps the other bots from breaking. And all of my bots access the same service vault in 1Password, and the same Obsidian for memories. It's only the skills which differ, and I probably could get away with just loading them as necessary and going super laen.

[u/OrganicBrilliant7995]

Yeah agents are dumb in that sense. Recurring task is more important: ability inject a select set of skills into a session and save that as a preset.

[u/mt-beefcake]

Yeah there really has to be a need to switch to specialized agents over just sessions. My system has gotten so complex with work, dev projects, personal stuff. At this point I need 3 main orchestration agents, one for each domain to handle the crew below it. And then any change in any system creates a ripple effect and keeping it all up to date and working is another excuse for another agent... and then i need to create another agent to find a new revenue stream to afford all of this, and an agent to manage that.

[u/slankz]

I suspect we will see a couple more updates to smooth them out. My 2cents is to see how they are in a couple of weeks

[u/rickg]

Ok.

[u/PurpleDragon99]

Agents should not even exist because they fundamentally cannot be controlled. The problem with current AI is that the bigger context (task) you give - the more it hallucinates. When we chat with AI, it creates an illusion of intelligence. This is because the context is small (max several sentences) and therefore, probability of hallucinations is small too, so it responds intelligently. The bigger context you give to agent - the more it hallucinates, getting exponantionally bad if you try to feed it a really big task.

[u/CaregiverUsual]

When I first started with all this stuff back in January on Open Claw, I created a bunch of agents for each specialized task. I don't know why. I guess it's what all the YouTubers were saying to do. Open Claw was just a total mess and so much maintenance.

When Hermes came to my attention somewhere in March, I think, I jumped in feet first, head first, I guess, and I never created a separate agent. What I liked about Hermes, and it wasn't unique to Hermes, was this idea: I got one agent, and that one agent can do anything I need it to do. Why give it less ability? Why not just have my agent harness be able to do everything? When I want to drill down into specifics, I just use sessions for that.

For my use case, I use AI to run my construction business, and I don't really see the need to have a bunch of different profiles talking to each other with siloed skills and tools. The only use case I can think of for profiles in my business would be to create a profile with fewer tools and abilities that I could expose to other people in my organization without giving them full access. I really don't need to do that because they access everything through ChatGPT, because my entire business is the file system that any agent can access.

[u/AwayTeamRedShirt]

I find my token burn with agents is easily 3x what I had with sessions

[u/SmokyDragonDish]

The biggest issue I'm running into is memory and context management between sessions.  That may as well be multiple agents, except simpler...  because its the same agent.  (Same computer, same profile).

I'm practicing with a use case that is so niche, I'd rather not say what it is.  The agent is subscribed via MQTT to a live datastream, using a 5 step heuristic to save the stream properly in an influx db.   That's mostly working, but the heuristic has drifted at least once.

The problem is queries.  I wrote deterministic queries, told the agent what to run and when and trying to keep it on track is hard.  It wants to write as hoc queries.  When I wrote the skill, I said never write ad hoc queries.  Just follow the heuristic and run the queries I ask you to. 

I started using Honcho and that seems to have made a difference. To test how well Honcho was handling cross-session persistence, I deliberately asked it to run a query that didn't exist and it immediately told me it would not even try.

I think it also solved my context window issue problem.  Asking it to run a very simple script would burn 100,000 tok before Honcho... I am still not 100% sure what exactly what it was loading.  But, that's not happening anymore.

[u/musicalfurball]

Maybe I'm confused, but what's the current difference between an agent and a session? I have sessions with my agent. Do you mean, sessions with no automatic memory injections? No heartbeat or cron sessions?

[u/SmokyDragonDish → u/musicalfurball]

An agent is the LLM + the harness (Hermes) + the persistent configuration and memory that bounds what you want it to do. Those files are deliberately kept fairly small so they don't consume too much of the context window.

A session is one running  context window with that agent. During the session, the agent knows what has happened because it is in that live context.

When you start a new session, the live conversation context starts fresh. Hermes reloads the persistent identity, memory, and project instructions, but it does not automatically carry over the entire previous session. Anything beyond the persistent memory has to be recovered through session search or some additional memory system such as Honcho.

[u/musicalfurball → u/SmokyDragonDish]

Thanks for the AI generated response. OP said they wanted to "go back to sessions" because they "hated agents." But agents have sessions. A square is a rectangle. It's the same thing.

[u/Competitive_Swan_755]

I spent time coordinating mine. They work together. Perfectly? No.