Last verified: Jul 31, 2026 · OpenClaw 2026.6.8; Hermes v2026.6.5+555 commits (2026-07-04)

This digest rounds up recent changes in the two open-source self-hosted agent harnesses AgentHub tracks — OpenClaw and Hermes — as of late July 2026. It’s distilled from each project’s own changelog and commit history (see sources); every entry below is traceable to a real release note or commit.

OpenClaw — 2026.6.8

The installed CLI reports OpenClaw 2026.6.8 (844f405). The 2026.6.8 release is broad; the highlights:

• Channels. Telegram delivery got structured rich text — tables, lists, expandable blockquotes, and preserved intentional line breaks — plus prompt-preserving handoff to CLI backends. WhatsApp now honors configured ACP bindings.
• Agent & gateway recovery. Sharper handling across account-scoped DM sends, generated-media completions, yielded-subagent pauses, main-session heartbeat de-duplication, session-identity prompts, and rejection of unknown OpenAI agent selectors.
• Providers & models. GLM-5.2 support and Claude Haiku 4.5 catalog entries landed; provider-qualified model IDs are now normalized across OpenRouter and Google Vertex; managed SecretRef auth; OAuth image-default routing through Codex; and recovery for invalid OpenAI reasoning-signature and genericized Anthropic thinking-signature errors.
• /usage and reply hooks. A native full footer renderer with a default template, fixed-decimal formatting, credential-aware limits, and warnings for broken templates instead of silent bad output.
• UI & mobile. Workspace files can collapse; WebChat backscroll survives streaming; the sidebar session picker stays interactive; iOS reconnects stale foreground gateways.
• Memory & state. Oversized OpenAI embedding batches split before HTTP 431s; QMD memory search stays available in transient mode; SQLite avoids WAL on NFS state volumes; Infinity chunk limits stay genuinely unbounded.
• Dependencies. Hono updated to 4.12.25.

Version-lag caveat: the npm-global binary is 2026.6.8, but the config schema is written by a newer 2026.7.1-2. The CLI warns about this on every run. Reconcile with openclaw gateway uninstall && openclaw gateway install and openclaw status --deep. See the install guide.

Hermes — post-v2026.6.5 development

Hermes ships no standalone CHANGELOG file, so this section is read from the git history of NousResearch/hermes-agent. The repo sits at base tag v2026.6.5 plus 555 commits, latest commit 2026-07-04. Notable recent changes:

• Dashboard. A full-featured profile builder (model + skills + MCPs) (#39084).
• Docker. Image-size optimization — .dockerignore, dropped dev deps, split build layers (#38749).
• TTS. Gemini audio-tag rewrite and a Gemini persona-prompt file.
• Curator. A shared atomic state writer (fixes concurrent skill-state writes).
• Memory & skills. Repairs to the write-approval inline prompt, gateway staging, and the gateway /skills review (#43452).
• Self-update. Self-heals a venv left half-built by an interrupted install (#42172) — directly relevant if your hermes setup was ever killed mid-run.
• Tooling. Typecheck in CI; TypeScript bumped to 6.
• Dev workflow. The most recent commits bind-mount source code for continuous development.

What this means for operators

If you run OpenClaw, the 2026.6.8 channel + provider hardening is the upgrade that matters most — Telegram rich text and GLM-5.2/Haiku-4.5 support are user-visible. Mind the version lag. If you run Hermes, the self-heal-venv and curator atomic-writer fixes are the operationally important ones (they prevent broken installs and state corruption); the profile-builder dashboard is the user-visible win.

Both are MIT-licensed and under active, fast development. This digest is a snapshot; check the sources for the canonical, always-current changelogs.