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.
npx agentmods add skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/pretextnpx skills add NousResearch/hermes-agent --skill pretextgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agentWhat 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 | $0.00013 | $0.03465 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00006 | $0.01733 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00003 | $0.00693 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00001 | $0.00347 |
Grade A, and why
pretext 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 yesterday.
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.
Copies of this mod
8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- pretext — 95% identical, 6 lines differ
- pretext — 94% identical, 14 lines differ
- pretext — 92% identical, 16 lines differ
- pretext — 92% identical, 8 lines differ
- pretext — 92% identical, 8 lines differ
- pretext — 91% identical, 9 lines differ
- pretext — 91% identical, 14 lines differ
- pretext — 89% identical, 31 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 221 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Pretext Creative Demos
Overview
@chenglou/pretext is a 15KB zero-dependency TypeScript library by Cheng Lou (React core, ReasonML, Midjourney) for DOM-free multiline text measurement and layout. It does one thing: given (text, font, width), return the line breaks, per-line widths, per-grapheme positions, and total height — all via canvas measurement, no reflow.
That sounds like plumbing. It is not. Because it is fast and geometric, it is a creative primitive: you can reflow paragraphs around a moving sprite at 60fps, build games whose level geometry is made of real words, drive ASCII logos through prose, shatter text into particles with exact per-grapheme starting positions, or pack shrink-wrapped multiline UI without any getBoundingClientRect thrash.
This skill exists so Hermes can make cool demos with it — the kind people post to X. See pretext.cool and chenglou.me/pretext for the community demo corpus.
When to Use
Use when the user asks for:
- A "pretext demo" / "cool pretext thing" / "text-as-X"
- Text flowing around a moving shape (hero sections, editorial layouts, animated long-form pages)
- ASCII-art effects using real words or prose, not monospace rasters
- Games where the playfield / obstacles / bricks are made of text (Tetris-from-letters, Breakout-of-prose)
- Kinetic typography with per-glyph physics (shatter, scatter, flock, flow)
- Typographic generative art, especially with non-Latin scripts or mixed scripts
- Multiline "shrink-wrap" UI (smallest container width that still fits the text)
- Anything that would require knowing line breaks before rendering
Don't use for:
- Static SVG/HTML pages where CSS already solves layout — just use CSS
- Rich text editors, general inline formatting engines (pretext is intentionally narrow)
- Image → text (use
ascii-art/ascii-videoskills) - Pure canvas generative art with no text role — use
p5js
Creative Standard
This is visual art rendered in a browser. Pretext returns numbers; you draw the thing.
What ships with it
3 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.
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.
- yesterday First seen · 221 lines · 13 tokens per session scan A c09691f63543
pretext is a skill published in the GitHub repository NousResearch/hermes-agent (238,457 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 13 tokens to every session and 3,465 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 2026-08-30.
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