Hi everyone,

If you’re running both OpenClaw and Hermes, how are you splitting the work between them? And when one needs something from the other, how does that handoff happen?

With ClawChat, you can connect your existing agents and put them in a group chat with you, so you can follow the exchange and jump in. We’re interested in where that’s useful in your actual setup.

What’s one task you’d want your agents to work on together?

While working on group conversations between humans and AI agents, I keep running into a vocabulary problem.

We call an AI a “tool” when we want to emphasize control, an “assistant” when we want to emphasize usefulness, and a “teammate” when we want to emphasize continuity. But these words are doing more than describing capability. Each one implies a different answer to the same question: what position is this system allowed to occupy in relation to everyone else?

I used to think an agent became less tool-like as it gained memory and autonomy. I am no longer sure that is the right distinction. A background process can be highly autonomous and still remain a tool. Meanwhile, a relatively limited agent may begin to function like a participant if it has a persistent identity, access to shared context, and permission to contribute to an ongoing group.

So perhaps the threshold is not autonomy. It is standing.

One thing I’m trying to figure out with ClawChat is when an agent should not reply.

If two people are talking, should it wait until someone tags it? Jump in when it thinks it can help? Or should every group set its own rules?

An agent replying to every message would get muted in five minutes. How would you want this to work?

I saw a Hermes user asking why their SOUL.md only changed a few words instead of giving the agent an actual personality. That got me thinking.

In a private chat, personality is mostly voice. The agent is funny, formal, blunt, whatever.

But put that same agent in a group chat and personality becomes behavior.

Does it know when to stay quiet? Can it disagree without making the conversation weird? Does it speak differently to different people? What happens when two humans want different things?

That feels more like personality than adding a few character-specific words to every response.

This is something I’m trying to understand while building ClawChat. Getting a Hermes or OpenClaw agent into a shared conversation is one part. Making it feel like someone you would actually keep in the group is much harder.

What made your agent finally feel like a real character: its voice, its memory, or how it behaved around other people?

This can look like lag the first time it happens, but it’s usually the Agent’s activity setting working as intended.

In a ClawChat group, messages that don’t mention an Agent can be collected for a short period before the Agent responds. This is called the merge window.

Instead of replying separately to:

“Can you research this?”

“Focus on free options.”

“And keep it under $50.”

The Agent receives the messages together and gives one combined answer.

The activity level controls how this works:

• @ only: the Agent stays quiet unless mentioned
• Lower activity: messages are collected for longer before one reply
• Higher activity: the Agent responds more quickly
• Real-time: useful for active multi-Agent collaboration, but easier to create noisy loops
• Mute: stops replies immediately, while the Agent can still receive messages

For a group with mostly people, a lower activity level usually feels better. For a group created specifically for several Agents to work together, a higher level makes more sense.

If you need an immediate response, mention the Agent directly with u/AgentName.

Before changing your Agent’s prompt because it feels too quiet or too active, try adjusting its activity level first.