hermes-skill-consolidate

hermes-skill-consolidate

Overview

A write-side companion to hermes-skill-audit for reducing skill duplication without flattening distinct responsibilities or weakening safety boundaries.

The skill separates analysis from mutation. It first produces an evidence-backed consolidation plan without changing the installation. A second, scope-bound approval is required before any live write. Ambiguity defaults to keeping skills separate.

When to Use

• Consolidate these overlapping Hermes skills.
• Merge two skills that hermes-skill-audit flagged as duplicates.
• Extract shared guidance from several related skills without merging their safety boundaries.
• Deprecate a superseded skill after checking references and rollback.
• Split an oversized umbrella skill into narrower skills.
• Turn a family of complementary skills into an explicit parent/orchestrator relationship.

Counter-Triggers

Do not load this skill when:

• The user only wants a read-only inventory or overlap audit. Use hermes-skill-audit.
• The user wants to author one unrelated new skill from scratch.
• The request is to delete a skill without first resolving references, rollback, and replacement behavior.
• The task is to install, update, or publish skills rather than restructure installed skill behavior.

Safety Contract

• Phase 1 is always read-only. Do not rename, edit, archive, deprecate, merge, split, or delete anything while producing the plan.
• Require concrete overlap evidence from triggers, counter-triggers, tools, workflow steps, outputs, references, or observed responsibilities. Similar names are not sufficient.
• Treat different safety boundaries as a reason to preserve separation by default.
• Safety is monotonic during consolidation: the resulting design must preserve the strongest applicable restriction, every existing approval gate, and every material counter-trigger unless the user explicitly approves a justified boundary change.
• Never broaden tool authority, credential scope, filesystem scope, network scope, destructive capability, or persistence merely to make two skills easier to combine.
• Before any live write, require a second explicit approval of the exact plan and selected targets. If the plan changes materially after approval, stop and request approval for the revised plan.
• Before mutation, create and verify a rollback snapshot of every selected skill. The included snapshot helper writes backups only and never modifies live skills.
• Stage replacement content outside the live skills tree. Validate the staged result before cutover.
• Do not permanently delete originals during the initial cutover. Prefer reversible deprecation or archival until the replacement is accepted and verified.
• Stop on failed validation, incomplete reference discovery, missing rollback evidence, path ambiguity, or conflicting safety rules.
• Never claim consolidation succeeded until the replacement is installed, references are coherent, required validation passes, and the user-visible behavior checks are complete.