What is hermes-fork-maintainer?

A maintenance guide for a personal Hermes fork, meaning a customized copy of the Hermes Agent code. It describes rebasing changes, rebuilding an integration branch, resolving conflicts, and protecting the live editable installation.

Use it to update a Hermes fork, combine upstream and personal changes, resolve conflicts, and verify the deployed branch. It also covers working safely with a root-owned live checkout.

It reduces outages caused by putting the live installation on a feature branch or merging fork changes without checking sensitive files. It requires checking the live branch before and after maintenance.

hermes-fork-maintainer — Skill by davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit --skill hermes-fork-maintainer

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit/hermes-fork-maintainer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit/hermes-fork-maintainer)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit/hermes-fork-maintainer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit/hermes-fork-maintainer/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit/hermes-fork-maintainer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit/hermes-fork-maintainer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 174 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,755 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00174	$0.01755
Opus 5.5	$0.00070	$0.00702
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00035	$0.00351
Haiku 4.5	$0.00017	$0.00176

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 77e9e36d135f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

hermes-fork-maintainer scanned grade B with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/hermes-triage.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

sudo ~/.claude/skills/hermes-fork-maintainer/scripts/hermes-triage.sh --assert # exit 0 = safe

skills/hermes-fork-maintainer/SKILL.md · 139 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 139 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hermes Fork Maintainer

A personal Hermes fork is a distribution: upstream main plus a stack of feature PRs merged into one integration branch. When the fork is deployed as an editable install, there is no build step — the checked-out git branch IS the running code. (This setup example: [email protected]:<your-fork>/hermes-agent.git, the integration branch is integrated, the live editable install is at /opt/hermes/home/.hermes/hermes-agent — substitute your own fork URL and host.)

The deploy invariant (read first, every time)

The live tree MUST stay on the integration branch (integrated). git checkout <feature-branch> on the live tree silently swaps the running agent's code. Two prior outages were caused exactly this way.

NEVER git checkout a feature branch on the live checkout.
Do dev/PR work in a git worktree (/opt/hermes/dev/hermes-agent is the existing dev split here) or under a dev profile.
After ANY operation, confirm git -C <live> branch --show-current == integrated.
Paths under /opt/hermes/ are root-owned: run git/the upgrade script with sudo.

Run the integrity check before AND after any fork work (env-overridable; defaults to this setup):

sudo ~/.claude/skills/hermes-fork-maintainer/scripts/hermes-triage.sh --assert   # exit 0 = safe

Quick reference

Task	Path
Live tree (must stay `integrated`)	`/opt/hermes/home/.hermes/hermes-agent`
Dev worktree (PR work happens here)	`/opt/hermes/dev/hermes-agent`
Upgrade driver (does steps 1–12)	`/opt/hermes/home/.hermes/upgrade-hermes.sh`
Distribution changelog	`CHANGELOG.integrated.md`
origin (push)	`davidgut1982/hermes-agent`
upstream (fetch only)	`NousResearch/hermes-agent`

The upgrade flow

The fork ships its own driver — NEVER run hermes update (it resets the clone to origin/main and DESTROYS the integration branch). Run the driver instead:

sudo /opt/hermes/home/.hermes/upgrade-hermes.sh

Read the full file on GitHub · 139 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 139 lines · 174 tokens per session scan B 77e9e36d135f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hermes-fork-maintainer is a skill published in the GitHub repository davidgut1982/hermes-toolkit (2 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 174 tokens to every session and 1,755 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Git and workflow

hermes-fork-maintainer next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
hermes-fork-maintainerdavidgut1982/hermes-toolkit	Skill	2	5mo ago	MIT	B	174	Claude Code, Codex
merge-batchdiegosouzapw/OmniRoute	Skill	83k	6d ago	MIT	A	46	Claude Code
prowler-commitprowler-cloud/prowler	Skill	15k	today	Apache-2.0	A	44	Claude Code, Codex
gh-auth-isolationgithub/gh-aw	Skill	5.6k	today	MIT	A	20	Claude Code, Codex
comet-githubrpamis/comet	Skill	3.3k	yesterday	MIT	A	72	Claude Code, Codex
github-skillzeenie-ai/OpenCompany	Skill	1.1k	2d ago	MIT	A	51	Claude Code
release-helperSahir619/fable-method	Skill	2.3k	1mo ago	MIT	A	43	Claude Code

hermes-fork-maintainer