hermes-agent-skill-authoring

hermes-agent-skill-authoring is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NousResearch/hermes-agent. It costs 22 tokens per session (3,575 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing SKILL.md files that define reusable instructions for an agent. It covers the required file structure and metadata for skills stored inside a repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating or editing agent skills in a code repository and preparing them to be committed with the project.
Why use it?
It helps keep in-repository skills consistent and suitable for sharing and review.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for hermes-agent. Also seen: mentions AGENTS.md; built for hermes-agent.

Good fit Creating or editing agent skills in a code repository and preparing them to be committed with the project.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/hermes-agent-skill-authoring
About the project

Hermes Agent is an AI assistant that learns from its use by creating and improving skills, retaining knowledge, searching past conversations, and adapting to its users. It is for people who want to run an agent through a terminal or messaging platforms while connecting it to different AI models and scheduled tasks.

NousResearch/hermes-agent · 244,059 stars · on GitHub · hermes-agent.nousresearch.com

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 NousResearch/hermes-agent --skill hermes-agent-skill-authoring
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

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.

agentmods badge for hermes-agent-skill-authoring

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/hermes-agent-skill-authoring/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/hermes-agent-skill-authoring)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/hermes-agent-skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/hermes-agent-skill-authoring/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for hermes-agent-skill-authoring

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/hermes-agent-skill-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/hermes-agent-skill-authoring.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 22 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,575 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 7 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 7 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 41
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 110
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00022 $0.03575
Opus 5 $0.00011 $0.01788
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00715
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00358

Measured 7d ago against content hash 3a274d5b42fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hermes-agent-skill-authoring scanned grade A with 0 findings 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 7d ago.

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.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/software-development/hermes-agent-skill-authoring/SKILL.md · 213 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 213 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Authoring Hermes-Agent Skills (in-repo)

Overview

There are two places a SKILL.md can live:

  1. User-local: ~/.hermes/skills/<maybe-category>/<name>/SKILL.md — personal, not shared. Created via skill_manage(action='create').
  2. In-repo (this skill is about this case): skills/<category>/<name>/SKILL.md or optional-skills/<category>/<name>/SKILL.md inside the hermes-agent repo — committed, shipped with the package. Use write_file + git add. skill_manage(action='create') does NOT target this tree.

In-repo skills must meet the repo's hardline authoring standards (see AGENTS.md, "Skill authoring standards (HARDLINE)" — that section is the source of truth; this skill is the operational walkthrough). Reviewers reject PRs that violate them, so meeting them up front is cheaper than a salvage pass later.

When to Use

  • User asks you to add a skill "in this branch / repo / commit"
  • You're committing a reusable workflow that should ship with hermes-agent
  • You're editing an existing skill under skills/ or optional-skills/ (use patch for small edits, write_file for rewrites; skill_manage still works for patch on in-repo skills, but not for create)
  • Don't use for: personal skills in ~/.hermes/skills/ (just use skill_manage)

Decide the Tier First: Bundled vs Optional

  • Bundled (skills/<category>/) — daily-driver behavior, broadly useful across many user types, low footprint. Hard bar: you can say "a user will load this in 5+ sessions per month" with a straight face.
  • Optional (optional-skills/<category>/) — niche, vertical-specific (blockchain, gaming, finance, one app), recurring-job/task skills, or anything heavy. Installed via hermes skills install official/<category>/<skill>.

When in doubt, optional. Promoting later is easy; demoting is churn. "Would be useful to anyone who ever needs this" is an optional-tier argument, not a bundled one.

Pick the category by what the tool IS, not what it feels like (an AI-agent CLI goes in autonomous-ai-agents/ even if it "feels productivity"). Confirm existing categories with search_files(pattern='*', target='files', path='skills') and don't invent new top-level categories casually.

Read the full file on GitHub · 213 lines

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.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 213 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A 3a274d5b42fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hermes-agent-skill-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository NousResearch/hermes-agent (244,059 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 3,575 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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