Tbh Otis started as a personal TUI agent because I wanted something adapted to how I like to visualize things. Then from there it turned into the unified experience across local and hosted models to make it more accessible and intuitive for anyone. There is some overlap with Hermes but the interface is quite complex for most users.
I don’t believe in sacrificing functionality but at the same time you should not need to understand and learn model runtimes and harnesses etc. to use powerful AI successfully. Ollama and similar tools give users a bunch of models, options and settings to sift through but with Otis the focus is on simplicity, abstracting away the complexity to make getting right to work easy.
I agree though that I need to do a better job of communicating Otis’ differentiators. FWIW I am thinking about additional features to further simplify the experience, like automatic model routing.