Well, I've finally had enough.
OpenClaw started an agentic revolution. It was a proof of concept of what AI can and should be, a platform where you can create AI powered agents to perform specialized tasks, use tools, automate processes and more. I was in love the first day I installed it and my mind was swimming with possibilities.
From the begining I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it..build the collection of AI powered OSINT tools that I've always wanted but never had the skills to build with code alone. OpenClaw, while a little clunky and always a work in progress, was perfect for this project.
I built Samaritan !
The Samaritan Project is a multi-agent OSINT investigation platform built on OpenClaw, runs on dedicated bare-metal hardware and handles prebuilt OSINT workflow automatically. Even though I've put in information collection logging that follow professional standards, it's created as a preliminary tool for investigations or information look up for personal use and hobbyist.
I am very proud of it.
However, you can look back across the previous blog posts and see that building on OpenClaw and keeping it running has been a royal pain in the ass. The update clusterf*ck alone has become more than I want to deal with. Even though I'd created an update script to get ahead of issues and correct them first so that the system didn't crash, I was spending more time troubleshooting than actually using the platform. Every time I logged in I was spending 30+ minutes (sometimes hours) fixing what new thing the devs broke in this week's update, and it finally got old.
Another, but lesser of the irritations is constantly connecting Codex. For some reason OpenClaw can only authenticate your account for a week at a time, so every 7 days you have to re-authenticate.
Over the last month or so I haven't had the energy to mess with it anymore and haven't even logged on more than a few times. I knew it was time to move on from it.
So now what?
Hermes Agent has become my go to agentic application. It doesn't work like OpenClaw in that you don't create agents ( although they have recently launched bots). Hermes is the main agent. But you can spin up sub-agents or create different profiles...which is honestly overkill and over complicated.
It's easier to use, updates are seamless, it comes with some great skills baked in that you can choose to turn on or off depending on need, and integration with Obsidian and the other tools I use works great.
Then there's the resources. I had OpenClaw running on a Minisforum mini PC with an 13th gen i7, 2TB drive and 32GB RAM. In today's memory and storage market that's wasting a lot of valuable resources for something I had basically stopped using.
Turning Agents into skills.
I spent this past week converting my OSINT agents in OpenClaw into Anthropic standard skills that can be installed anywhere, rather building another agentic system locked onto a platform. Surprisingly they converted well. Once I ensured that I had the exact same tools and dependencies, they work even better as skills than agents, and Hermes is a breeze because I'm not constantly troubleshooting the platform.
My new OSINT workstation.
My mission to build a full featured OSINT workstation has now moved to a used Ryzen 7 ThinkPad that had laying around doing nothing, upgraded with another 2TB Drive and 32GB RAM long before the prices got ridiculous. It's running ParrotOS with on top of it Hermes just like the Mini PC was, and I successfully moved or reinstalled all of my OSINT tools and resources. Honestly this is a much cleaner set up, and it's now mobile if I need it to be.
The Samaritan Project continues
My interest in OSINT and information tools is not limited to the skills I've built for Samaritan. I believe that people should have access to the tools that inform them of what's going on in the world around them. There's so much out there that the average person doesn't know they have every right to see, track, monitor and protect themselves from and I love the tools that allow us to do that.
The Samaritan Project will continue to blog about OSINT, Privacy, and the tools and technologies that arm the average citizen with the information that is available to them.
“People should not be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."
- V
Github - https://github.com/SamaritanOC
X - https://x.com/samaritanv1