Summary
Craig Hewitt, founder of podcast hosting platform Castos, compares GrokBot (by SpaceX/Cursor) and Hermes as concurrent AI agent platforms running inside a real seven-figure SaaS business. Rather than a feature matrix, the video documents how Craig uses both systems for distinct purposes — making the comparison grounded in actual operational decisions rather than benchmarks.
GrokBot, which Craig describes as “wheels included,” connects to Gmail, Help Scout, and CRM with zero technical requirements, runs Grok 4.5, and operates as a personal chief-of-staff assistant. Its limitations are deliberate tradeoffs: agents cannot be shared with teammates, models are not configurable per agent, and all security is managed by the vendor. Craig runs two GrokBot chiefs-of-staff — one for Castos, one for personal advisory and YouTube work — each with specialized sub-agents reporting up.
Hermes, by contrast, is open-source and self-hosted on a Mac mini (Craig notes it must run on always-on hardware, making a Mac mini or VPS like Hetzner the practical choice). It runs Codex and GPT-5.5, lives in Slack, and is architected as a multi-agent orchestrator with planned specialization into dev, product, marketing, support, and finance agents. The tradeoff is full control over models, security, and sub-agent design at the cost of infrastructure ownership. Craig frames the choice not as better vs. worse but as managed-and-fast versus configurable-and-durable — a distinction that maps cleanly to technical comfort level and how deeply a team wants to customize their agent stack.
📺 Source: Craig Hewitt · Published August 27, 2026
🏷️ Format: Comparison
