Skills

• Reusable Procedures
• Community Catalog
• Slash Commands
• Custom Skills
• Improvement During Use
• Auto-Archiving

Skills are reusable procedures that turn repetitive work into reliable assets.

If you have used Claude Code or other CLI agents, the concept of a “skill” will sound familiar. But the way Hermes implements it has one core difference: a skill is not just a static document you write up front — it is something the agent creates, edits, and improves on its own while it works. That is exactly the foundation of Nous Research’s “the agent that grows with you” promise.

The problem Skills solve

When you hand a complex task to an AI agent — deploying to Kubernetes, reviewing PRs against team standards, writing the weekly financial report — the traditional approach is to stuff all the instructions into the system prompt or repeat them in every chat. That is both token-expensive and “learns” nothing across sessions. Skills solve this with a progressive disclosure mechanism: the agent sees only the name + short description of every available skill (~3k tokens for the entire list), and loads a skill’s full content into context only when it is truly needed.

Three sources of skills in practice

1. Bundled — shipped with Hermes at install time, living in ~/.hermes/skills/.
2. Community — installed from Skills Hub (skills.sh, GitHub taps such as openai/skills, anthropics/skills, or a direct URL).
3. Self-made — written by you, generated by the agent itself via skill_manage, or, even faster, turned from any document or process into a skill with the /learn command — no hand-writing required.

Practical usage

/plan redesign the auth flow of the system
/github-pr-workflow /test-driven-development fix issue #123 and open a PR

Each skill automatically becomes a slash command. You can stack up to 5 skills in a single command, or wrap them into a bundle (hermes bundles create backend-dev --skill ... --skill ...) to get one short command for a whole multi-step workflow — usable across CLI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, and the dashboard.

The biggest difference: a skill does not stand still. After each complex session, the agent evaluates “what I just learned” and can write/patch skills itself so the next run is faster — with an approval gate (skills.write_approval) if you want tight control before those changes take effect.

This chapter of the Hermes Agent handbook goes deeper into each aspect: how skills are reused, the community catalog, the slash command mechanism, how to create custom skills, the self-improvement loop, and the storage/sync mechanism.