https://goose-docs.ai Goose Goose is an AI assistant application. It’s something you install because you want an AI that can: - Chat with you - Write and edit code - Use your terminal - Modify files - Browse the web (with extensions) - Connect to services like GitHub, Slack, databases, and Google Drive - Complete tasks on your computer You open Goose and ask it to do work, much like you would with ChatGPT or Claude Code, except it can take actions on your machine. Hermes Hermes is not an assistant you chat with. It’s infrastructure. Its job is to: - Host or connect to AI models - Route requests between different models - Manage AI services - Provide an API that other applications can use By itself, Hermes doesn’t give you much of a user experience. It’s more like a server running in the background. OpenClaw OpenClaw sits somewhere between the two. It’s an AI agent platform. Instead of being just a chat application like Goose or just infrastructure like Hermes, OpenClaw is designed to create AI agents that can: - Work on long-running tasks - Remember context over time - Use tools and APIs - Automate workflows - Be extended with custom capabilities - Act more independently than a typical chatbot It’s more of a framework for building and running AI agents than a simple assistant. An analogy Imagine a restaurant: - Goose is the waiter who talks to customers, takes orders, and serves meals. - Hermes is the kitchen that prepares the food and supplies everything needed behind the scenes. - OpenClaw is the restaurant manager who coordinates the staff, keeps track of orders, assigns work, and makes sure everything runs smoothly. Each serves a different purpose: - Without the kitchen, the waiter can’t serve food. - Without the waiter, customers have a poor experience. - Without the manager, the restaurant can still operate, but coordinating multiple people and ongoing work becomes much harder.