Skills & Knowledge

Hermes skills are reusable procedural memories — markdown files (SKILL.md) that encode workflows, commands, pitfalls, and reference material. They load automatically when relevant to a task.

Skill Architecture

Skills live under ~/.hermes/skills/ and are organized into categories:

~/.hermes/skills/
  devops/
    nginx-site-admin/
    kanban-orchestrator/
    kanban-worker/
    webhook-subscriptions/
  software-development/
    hermes-agent-skill-authoring/
    requesting-code-review/
    systematic-debugging/
  mlops/
    ... (training, inference, evaluation subdirs)
  creative/
    ... (design, ASCII art, video)
  research/
    ... (arxiv, snoopy, firecrawl)

Skill Structure

Each skill has a SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter and markdown body, plus optional support files:

references/ — Detailed reference docs linked from SKILL.md
templates/ — Reusable templates (e.g., cron-safe backup prompts)
scripts/ — Helper scripts that the skill invokes
assets/ — Images, diagrams, other static files

Skill Authoring Convention

We follow a strict preference order when updating skills:

Patch the currently-loaded skill if it covers the new learning territory
Update an existing umbrella skill via skills_list + skill_view
Add a support file under an existing umbrella (references/, templates/, scripts/)
Create a new class-level umbrella only when nothing existing covers it

This prevents skill sprawl — we want deep, rich skills with support files, not a flat list of narrow one-session skills.

Key Skills We’ve Built

Skill	Category	Purpose
`nginx-site-admin`	devops	Governing umbrella for Playground site, cron jobs, and backups
`kanban-orchestrator`	devops	Decomposition playbook for PMO task routing
`kanban-worker`	devops	Pitfalls and patterns for kanban task execution
`himalaya`	email	IMAP/SMTP email from terminal, with Outlook.com guide
`hermes-agent`	autonomous-ai-agents	Configure, extend, and troubleshoot Hermes itself
`batch-job-verification`	batch-job-verification	Audit automated job outputs for quality
`systematic-debugging`	software-development	4-phase root cause debugging methodology
`requesting-code-review`	software-development	Pre-commit review with security scan

Cron + Skills Interaction

The cron scheduler resolves skills from the global ~/.hermes/skills/ directory, not from profile skill directories even when workdir points to a profile path. To use profile-specific skills in cron jobs, add the profile’s skill directory to skills.external_dirs in the profile’s config.yaml.

Syncing Skills to Profiles

After editing a global skill that’s also used by a profile (like nginx-site-admin for the Playground), run:

sync-to-profile.sh playground

This copies updated skill files to the profile directory so the next cron run picks up changes.