# hermes-skills: a catalog for skills that survive machine rebuilds

*2026-08-19*

> A personal collection of Hermes Agent skills with a repeatable contribution path — template, catalog, one-command installer.


Hermes Agent skills are just folders with a `SKILL.md`, which is exactly why they rot: they end up scattered across profiles and machines, unversioned, unrecorded. This repo is the fix I built for myself — a single maintained collection where every skill is registered in a catalog, installable with one command, and documented well enough that future-me (or anyone) can tell what it does without reverse-engineering the prompt.

The structure is deliberately boring: a `_template` scaffold you copy, a `skills/README.md` catalog you register into, and an installer script. Stateful skills keep tracker archives and metric snapshots on the host (under `~/.intel/` for Argus), never in the repo; durable user preferences now use Hermes's native persistent memory.

Features:

- **One-command install**: `./scripts/install-skill.sh <name>` copies any skill into `~/.hermes/skills/`
- **Copy-paste scaffold** (`skills/_template/`) so new skills start with correct frontmatter
- **Catalog pattern** — every published skill gets an index entry; nothing ships undocumented
- **CONTRIBUTING.md** documents the repeatable path, because the second contributor is usually yourself in six months
- First resident: **Argus** — a standing intelligence watch now built around Hermes 0.21 native memory, continuity, monitor gating, notepad state, reasoning controls, and Bot Chat delivery
- MIT licensed, safe to fork and strip down to your own set

Source: [github.com/rahlquist/Argus](https://github.com/rahlquist/Argus)