Hermes Agent Skills That Make It 10x More Powerful

0:00 Ever since Hermes' Agent was released, people have been setting up all kinds of workflows on it. And to make an already powerful Agent even better, people have also built a lot of skills for it. Some of them have even become some of the most trending projects on GitHub. Now, you might wonder why you'd need to install more skills in the first place because Hermes already comes with a lot of them, and it can even create new ones from your workflows. But, the skills Hermes creates only come from the processes it learns from you. These other skills are built by people who have already solved problems Hermes can't handle on its own. And they've packaged those solutions into skills you can use. Now, if you're new to the channel, then welcome. We're a software company, and this is AI Labs. And in this video, we're going to go over the skills that actually make using Hermes' Agent so much better. But, before we start with the first one, you need to know this. Even though we're using these skills with Hermes, most of them can be used with any AI coding agent. Now, if you've been working with coding agents, even if it's Hermes or literally any other agent, they all have the same problem. If you're having a long conversation, your agent can forget the details you mentioned earlier. So, you have to give it the same instruction a second time. And this happens more often when you're using Opus models with Hermes because they tend to forget things more quickly. This happens because there are too many messages in your context window, and the model has to pay attention to all of them. When that happens, it can lose track of the smaller details, and you get worse answers. To solve that problem, there is a skill called Planning with Files. It keeps the plan where the agent can't ignore it. Instead of keeping the plan in the chat and taking up space in the context window, this skill converts the plan into three files in your project folder. The first one is task plan.md, which basically splits your main task into smaller tasks so the agent can do them one at a time. Then, there's findings.md, which holds every problem the agent faced and how it solved it. If the same problem happens again, the agent can use those learnings to avoid it. And the last one is progress.md, which records how far the agent has gotten. Now, you might think keeping your plan in files isn't new, and most of you might already be doing it. What sets this skill apart is that the agent can't ignore the plan. That's because it uses a hook, which forcefully inserts the three files into the context window, which is why the model can't choose to ignore it. Now, most agents don't support hooks, but Hermes is one of the few that does. And according to their own testing, the agent performed much better with the hook running because it didn't drift away from the task that it was assigned. The install commands for all the agents are listed in the repo, which will be listed in the description below. Once you have it installed, it'll be added alongside all the other skills.

2:32 And the hooks are going to be automatically installed in your agent. The skill file explains what the three files are, where they should be, and what each one does. It also includes all the rules the agent needs to follow, so it knows what it's working with. So, once you have this installed, you can run the skill and give it a prompt for what you want the agent to do. Here you can see that the agent started by creating the task plan, the findings, and then the progress files as well.

2:56 Then it asked us questions, and we answered them as we went. After that long session, it finalized the plan and gave us the three files. But before we go into the next skill, it would be great if you subscribe to the channel and hit the hype button. This small gesture of support goes a long way for us. You might already know that you can use multiple coding tools with Hermes. For example, you can connect your code subscription to Hermes agent and use its models. You might also know that Hermes already has a Claude code skill that sends tasks directly to it. And it has the same kind of skill for Codex as well. But the problem with these skills is that Hermes won't use them unless you ask it to. You also have to say which tasks should go to each agent in your prompt. But there is another skill that sends a task to any agent that is already installed on your system. And this skill acts as an orchestrator between all of them. It also figures out which of your installed coding tools is best for which task and gives the work to that tool. This is actually a set of skills. The main one is called delegate setup, which coordinates the other agents. It also comes with dedicated delegation skills for different coding agents, including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. These agents run in a mode where they don't ask permission before running any command. So, the coding agent doesn't stop and wait for you to approve every change. To install this skill, run the install command. It asks you to choose from 18 skills, so you can select the tools installed on your system. Once installed, you will see that Hermes has the delegate setup skill ready for use. To use it, you just have to run the skill with the slash command, type in the prompt, and give it to Hermes agent. First, it identifies which coding tools are installed. Then, it gives you a complete map of what area each agent will handle, along with the exact model name and effort level. Once you approve the plan, it starts running the skills. It then sends each task to the agent picked for it. After every agent reports its findings, Hermes gives you one collective report and marks the task as complete. Now, you might already know that your Hermes agent runs terminal commands. Each terminal command is run, it returns an output that the agent has to read. 90% of the time, you don't even need all of the output that command produces. You only need a certain part of it. The rest just bloats the context for no reason. And just like we mentioned before, having too much information in the context window makes it harder for the agent to focus. That's where RTK comes in. It cuts the output of the terminal commands the agent runs and keeps only the parts the agent needs. So, the output gets filtered before it ever reaches the context window. It has a database of the terminal commands agents use most often, so it knows how to filter their output.

5:25 For example, if you run tests, the agent only needs to see the failed test results and not the passing ones. RTK does that by default and keeps only the failures. But the thing is, it's not actually a skill. It's a separate tool you install on your device and run from the terminal. And it's on this list because it makes sure your agent gets only the right context. If you want, you can also install it directly and tell the agent to use it. But, since agents tend to forget what we ask, we actually created a skill that tells the agent to route commands through this tool instead of running them the usual way. This skill also contains the details the agent needs along with a reference for each command, so it knows which commands it can use and how to use them. You can add this skill to your Hermes setup.

6:07 Once you've done that, you can give Hermes any task and it will run every command through RTK instead of using the usual method. Only the output the agent needs reaches the context window, so Hermes can give you more accurate answers. But, before we move on to the next one, let's have a word by our sponsor, Plural. Running production infrastructure usually comes down to one thing, the 3:00 a.m. alert and digging through Kubernetes logs to find what broke. Plural fixes that with workbenches. They're AI agents that actually operate your infrastructure for you and they run inside your existing access controls, so nothing happens that you haven't already allowed. Here's what sold us. We wired it into our observability and when an alert fired, the agent didn't just ping us. It investigated on its own, dug through the logs and metrics, and came back with a real diagnosis and clear next steps. And workbench hooks into the tools you already run, like Datadog and Slack, so it can kick off on its own the moment an alert fires or on a schedule you set.

7:02 And instead of writing prompts from scratch, you hand them ready-made skills from Plural's library. It's basically an on-call engineer that never sleeps. Try Plural at the link in the description. Now, the next skill is by Google and it's called Mantis. Mantis is a set of security review skills that your agents can run. It contains a variety of skills, each focusing on a different area of security review. This setup works no matter what app you're building, be it a mobile app or a web app. You can install it and use it for whatever you're working on. The installation command is listed in the GitHub repo. When you run the install command, you will be asked to choose between the many specialized skills it has. It's better to install all of them because they are separate pieces of the whole review process. Once you've installed it in your setup, you'll see all of the installed listed. For example, there is a skill called Mantis Plan, and it plans out your security review process before you actually begin. It also contains a skill called Mantis Reflect that goes back over all the findings and make sure the failures are documented properly. Now, you might think if Hermes is an always running agent and we don't usually code with it, why would we even need to add Mantis there? But, the reason is that once your app is hosted, it needs security reviews again and again, and that isn't something you want to remember to do yourself. And that's what makes Hermes the best place to run them. It has cron jobs, which are basically tasks that run on their own on a schedule. You can set one up that runs this review set against the app you've hosted. And because Hermes is running all the time, it can alert you on Slack or any other connected platform if it finds a problem. We also have a similar setup for our own project. Here, you can see that we gave Hermes our project in the prompt and told it to run the full set over the code. It keeps finding issues and applying fixes, which keeps the app healthy for us and ensures that it doesn't have any bugs. If you've ever tried researching with agents, you might have run into a huge problem. Your agent is denied access to certain content.

8:52 This happens because a lot of sites like Reddit don't want models using their content. But, those sites are really valuable since they have real users talking about problems and their opinions and experiences, which makes the information useful for research. To give agents access to that content, there is a skill called Agent Reach. It gives Hermes access to the sites that are usually restricted, including Reddit, GitHub, and many others. It uses free methods, so it doesn't cost you anything. It was also the number one trending project on GitHub recently.

9:21 Now, you can install this in your Hermes setup, and it'll give you access to more than 15 platforms. It can search Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Once you have it installed, you can use it directly from Hermes and ask it to search for any topic on any platform. It runs its own scripts, finds the relevant information, and then gives you the answers that you need. Now, as you already know, Hermes comes with more than 90 skills built in. And aside from that, when Hermes sees a workflow in your chat that could be useful in the future, it actually creates a skill out of it, and then it can use that skill in future runs. It sounds good because it's adapting to you automatically, but there is a problem with this. The only part of a skill that actually goes into the context window is its name and description. They get sent with each of your messages so that the agent knows these skills exist. Now, you might say that the name and description make up a small chunk and wouldn't affect the context window at all. But if you have over 100 skills and you've been using Hermes for a long time, all those names and descriptions start consuming a huge portion of the context window. So, to solve this issue, there's a whole set of skills built to make the agent more productive. But the one we're most interested in is the skill retriever skill. It replaces the full list of skill prompts with only the most relevant skill descriptions, which causes the context size to drop. So, basically, it runs another step before Hermes calls the model. It splits your message into small chunks that a model can understand, does the same to every skill you have, and then matches your message to the skills list. The skills that score highest are the ones it sends. Their docs put numbers on it.

10:54 They say that with the whole list going in, it used around 11,000 tokens. After this, it uses only 2.3 thousand, so they claim it saves more than 9,000 tokens every turn. Now, this helps you in two ways. First, there's a lot less going into the context window with every message you send, so it costs you less to run. And second, the agent isn't distracted by skills that have nothing to do with what you asked, so you get better answers. This comes as a plugin, and skill retriever is one of the skills inside it. Once you've installed the plugin, you can enable skill retriever from the plugins area. Then the skill list going into the context will be much shorter than it used to be. Now, the RTK skill that we created in this video can be found in AI Labs Pro, which is our community. So, if you found value in what we do and want to support the channel, this is the best way to do it.

11:39 The link's in the description. That brings us to the end of this video. If you'd like to support the channel and help us keep making videos like this, you can do so by using the Super Thanks button below. As always, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.