Until now, if you wanted to do serious robotics, you had to live in the ROS 2 Universe. You had to navigate the old-school architecture of nodes, publishers, and subscribers. You had to learn the ROS jargon.
Its like programming before AI: you spent so much time focused on syntax and studying the language, you can quickly lose the forest for the trees. Even a seasoned engineer would act like they were fighting the computer rather than working with it.
And yes, in our last episode, I was excited about bridging Openclaw and ROS. The world’s moving so fast, that I’m now off both ROS and Openclaw now.
The new stack? Hermes and DORA.
If ROS 2 is dial-up internet, Dora is fiber optics. 17x faster & zero-copy shared memory (which apparently is important.)
Dora feels like vibe coding for hardware. It makes ROS 2 look like punch cards.
What used to take 7 files, complex build steps, and a prayer to the false-god known as ROS, has been distilled into a single, clean yaml file. So simple, I might even write my own node.
DORA is AI-native. Hermes plugs right into it allowing you to prompt your robot in plain language.
DORA is the future. The era of ROS-induced headaches is ending. The era of the Dora-driven, AI-integrated, intelligent agent is here.
And the wild part is, so many robot companies are so locked into ROS by now, that they’re going to be very hesitant to adapt. Getting into robotics now is like showing up to a sold out concert the moment they start giving away front row seats: you’ll be in front of everyone.
A big chunk of what made a robotics expert “the expert” just dissolved in the presence of Dora, like a middleware-demon crippled by the presence of an angel.
The world has shifted. Let’s see how long it takes the robot companies to catch up.