Skills System
Skills are on demand knowledge documents the agent can load when needed. They follow a progressive disclosure pattern to minimize token usage and are compatible
Skills are on-demand knowledge documents the agent can load when needed. They follow a progressive disclosure pattern to minimize token usage and are compatible with the agentskills.io open standard. All skills live in — the primary directory and source of truth. On fresh install, bundled skills are copied from the repo. …
What this page covers
- Starting with a blank slate
- Using Skills
- Progressive Disclosure
- SKILL.md Format
- Platform-Specific Skills
- Skill output and media delivery
- Forcing document-style delivery: [[asdocument]]
- Conditional Activation (Fallback Skills)
- Secure Setup on Load
- Skill Config Settings
- Skill Directory Structure
- External Skill Directories
- How it works
- Example
- Skill Bundles
- Quick example
- YAML schema
- Managing bundles
- Behavior
- When bundles beat installing each skill manually
- Agent-Managed Skills (skillmanage tool)
- When the Agent Creates Skills
- Actions
- Gating agent skill writes (skills.writeapproval)
- Skills Hub
- Common commands
- Supported hub sources
- Integrated hubs and registries
- Security scanning and --force
- Trust levels
- Update lifecycle
- Publishing a custom skill tap
- Bundled skill updates (hermes skills reset)
- Slash commands (inside chat)
Section outline mirrored from the official Hermes Agent documentation. Follow any heading to read the complete text on the source site.
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