Skills: Teach Once, Reuse Forever

Skills are Hermes Agent's signature feature: reusable procedure documents the agent writes for itself. Solve a gnarly problem once, and the working recipe is saved, searchable, and loaded automatically the next time a similar task appears.

How the loop works

Three moves, repeating: the agent solves a task; when a procedure proves reusable — a deployment dance, a report format, a fix for a recurring bug — it saves a skill (a markdown document with instructions); the next time a matching task shows up, the skill loads into context and the agent starts from experience instead of zero. Skills are stored under ~/.hermes/skills/, and a background curator keeps the collection healthy: tracking usage, marking stale skills, archiving what sits unused — with a backup before anything changes, and it never deletes.

Recipe 1 — Browse and install from the hub

hermes skills browse            # explore the public catalog
hermes skills search "pdf"     # find by keyword
hermes skills inspect ID       # preview before installing
hermes skills install ID       # install (hub ID or a direct SKILL.md URL)

Recipe 2 — Keep skills fresh

hermes skills check            # see what has updates
hermes skills update           # update outdated ones

Recipe 3 — Bring your own skill file

Any SKILL.md on the web installs by URL — including one in your own repo:

hermes skills install https://example.com/SKILL.md --name my-skill

Recipe 4 — Add a private tap (team library)

hermes skills tap add https://github.com/your-org/skill-library
hermes skills search "deploy"  # searches your org library too

Recipe 5 — Publish what your agent learned

When one of your agent-created skills is genuinely reusable, share it:

hermes skills publish ~/.hermes/skills/my-skill

Recipe 6 — Preload a skill for a specific run

hermes -s pdf-extract chat -q "Pull the tables from invoice.pdf into CSV"

Recipe 7 — Scheduled skill runs

Combine the cron system with a skill for standing automation — a nightly job that loads your report skill and posts the result to Telegram:

hermes cron create "0 21 * * *" --skills weekly-report \
  -q "Generate the metrics report and send it to me"

Recipe 8 — Curate the collection

hermes curator status          # what is stale, what is pinned
hermes curator pin my-skill    # exempt from archiving
hermes curator backup          # snapshot before big changes

The whole toolkit at a glance:

Skills plus memory are the two halves of Hermes getting better over time: memory keeps facts about you and your environment, skills keep procedures. Together they turn a general-purpose agent into your agent.