Skip to main content

Skills

Skills are Markdown instruction packages that the model discovers and reads on demand. They are useful for repeatable workflows, project conventions, and specialized tool procedures.

Layout​

$HERMES_HOME/skills/<skill-name>/
├── SKILL.md
├── references/    # Optional detailed documentation
├── templates/     # Optional reusable templates
├── scripts/       # Optional helper scripts
└── assets/        # Optional assets

SKILL.md begins with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: release-review
description: Verify a Python package before publishing a release.
---

# Release review

Run focused tests, inspect package contents, and report blockers before publish.

Use skills.external_dirs in config.yaml to discover shared skill roots:

skills:
  external_dirs:
    - /srv/team-skills

Tool surface​

Enable enabled_toolsets=["skills"] to expose:

  • skills_list, which scans local and external roots;
  • skill_view, which returns the complete selected document or supporting file;
  • skill_manage, which can create, patch, edit, delete, write, and remove skill files.

Skill content is not paginated. The model must receive the complete selected instruction rather than reading only the first page. Repeated unchanged views within one task can be deduplicated without changing the earlier content.

Prompt-cache behavior​

The list of available skill metadata can be incorporated into the stable conversation context, while full instructions are loaded through a tool call. Creating or editing a skill invalidates the skill snapshot for a later conversation; it does not rewrite past messages in the current conversation.

Packaging and trust​

Do not assume the Python distribution installs a large upstream skill catalog. Provision the exact skills needed by the application and version them alongside the deployment when reproducible trajectories matter.

Skills influence a tool-capable model, so treat third-party skill text and scripts as trusted code. Filesystem permissions remain the strongest way to make a shared skill repository read-only.

For a practical walkthrough, see Work with Skills.