Manage your Hermes skills in one touch from your phone
Hermes is generating skills faster than you can read them. Here is how to triage them in 30 seconds from your iPhone — without SSH, without a laptop, without losing the good ones to the noisy ones.
For the indie operator
You opened a Hermes runtime after the launch buzz. It works. It is now generating five to ten new skills a day in production, and you have not opened the host since Tuesday. The point of a self-improving agent is that you stop babysitting it — but the skill files still need a human to say which ones are good. This page is the 30-second daily routine that keeps the agent improving without asking you to SSH in.
What a Hermes skill is
A Hermes skill is a procedural memory file written by the agent after it solves a task. It encodes the steps the agent took, the inputs it expected, and the verification the agent ran. Skills sit in the agent's working directory and are loaded automatically into context when the agent recognizes a similar task.
The skills system is what separates Hermes from a stateless chat agent. It is also what makes triage mandatory: a wrong skill, once written, gets recalled the next time the trigger pattern matches. Catching it on day one is cheap; catching it on day fourteen, after four downstream skills referenced it, is expensive.
The 30-second daily flow
- Open Onepilot → Hermes → Skills. New skills since your last triage appear at the top with the diff, the ticket that triggered them, and the model that wrote them.
- Tap one of four actions per skill. Promote (stable), demote (move to a draft folder Hermes ignores), lock (freeze against future overwrites), or delete. Each tap writes through the existing SSH session to the host immediately.
- Spot-check yesterday. Tap any promoted skill to see its version history; rollback any version with one tap if a later edit broke it.
What this addresses
- Self-eval over-confidence. Hermes marks its own skills as successful when the verification was thin. A 30-second human pass is the cheapest cure.
- Manual edits getting overwritten. A locked skill cannot be overwritten by the agent. Lock the ones you have hand-tuned.
- Skill-library noise. Demoted skills stop polluting recall but are recoverable. Deleting only the certifiably wrong ones is safer than mass cleanup once a quarter.
What this does not replace
This flow is for skill governance — promote, demote, lock, delete, rollback. It is not a code review for the underlying behavior the skill encodes; complex skills still warrant a desktop session. The point is that the common case (75% of new skills are obvious keep-or-toss decisions) becomes free, so the harder ones get the attention they deserve.
Related
FAQ
What is the Hermes skills system?
The Hermes skills system is a procedural-memory layer in NousResearch's Hermes Agent. When the agent solves a problem, it writes the solution as a reusable skill file under its working directory, then recalls and improves that skill the next time the same situation appears. Skills survive across sessions and across model swaps. As of 2026 this is what makes Hermes 'self-improving' rather than session-bound.
Why do Hermes skills need triage?
Hermes auto-generates skills aggressively. A live agent commonly produces 5–10 new skill files per active day, and the agent's self-evaluation is documented to be over-confident — it tends to mark its own work as successful even when the skill is wrong, redundant, or overwrites a manual edit. Without human triage the skill library grows noisy fast. The fix is not to disable auto-skill creation; it is to triage the new skills daily, in seconds, before noise dilutes the useful ones.
Can I review Hermes skills from my iPhone?
Yes, through Onepilot. The Hermes runtime stores skills as files on the host. Onepilot exposes them through the iOS file browser with syntax highlighting and a one-tap promote / demote / lock / delete control on each skill. You triage in 30 seconds at a coffee, instead of SSH-ing into the host every evening.
How does one-tap skill triage work?
Onepilot tails the Hermes skills directory. New or modified skills appear at the top of the iPhone view with their diff, the ticket that triggered them, and four actions: promote (mark stable), demote (move to a draft folder Hermes ignores), lock (freeze against future overwrites), or delete. Each action is a single tap and takes effect on the host immediately via the existing SSH session.
Does Hermes skill triage need to happen on a desktop?
No. The reason it has historically happened on a desktop is that Hermes is a CLI agent and skill files live in the shell. Once the iPhone has a file browser and an SSH session pointed at the Hermes host — which is what Onepilot is — there is no desktop in the loop. Audit on the train, approve at lunch, lock before bed.
What if I miss a bad skill before the agent uses it again?
Every skill change is versioned on the host. Onepilot's skill view shows the timestamp and ticket of each version. Roll back any skill to any prior version with one tap; the change is written through SSH and the running Hermes process picks up the rollback on its next skill recall. There is no permanent damage from a missed triage as long as the underlying disk is not corrupted.
Triage your Hermes skills from your phone
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