Super AI agents: the real question isn't which one to pick
Devin, Codex, Hermès, OpenClaw… 2026 blew up AI agents. But for an SMB, the decisive choice isn't the most powerful one — it's where it runs.
2026, the year the agent left the chat window
Two years ago, AI at the office was a tab you opened to ask a question. Today it has a seat in the team's Slack: it reviews tickets, opens pull requests overnight, pings you when a payment fails. The word changed. We no longer say assistant, we say agent.
And the market went wild. Devin, OpenAI Codex, Google Jules, Cursor, Cline, Hermès, OpenClaw… Every month a new name "revolutionises" the job. For an SMB owner the noise is deafening — and the wrong question imposes itself: which one is the most powerful?
That's the wrong question. Here's the right one.
First, two families everyone keeps confusing
Under the word "agent" there are two very different beasts.
Agents that code. Devin (Cognition), OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cursor. You hand them a development task — fix a bug, migrate a module — and they carry it end to end: read the repo, write the code, run the tests, open a pull request. That's the workshop.
Agents that operate. Hermès (Nous Research), OpenClaw. They don't live in a code editor but in your everyday tools — WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, email. They remember your context, run multi-step tasks, learn your processes as they go. That's the team assistant, not the developer.