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docs: exclude per-skill pages from search, add curator feature page (#17563)
Skill catalog pages (bundled/optional) were drowning out real user-guide and reference docs in search results. There are ~3100 of them and they match on almost every generic term. - Add `ignoreFiles` regexes to docusaurus-search-local for `user-guide/skills/bundled/` and `user-guide/skills/optional/`. The two human-written catalog indexes (`reference/skills-catalog`, `reference/optional-skills-catalog`) remain indexed. - Add a new feature page `user-guide/features/curator.md` covering the curator subsystem merged in #16049 and refined in #17307 (per-run reports): how it runs, config, CLI (`hermes curator status/run/pin/ restore/...`), `.usage.json` telemetry, archival semantics, and recovery. Slotted into the Core features sidebar next to Skills. Search index size dropped from 5822 docs to 2704 in the main section; `user-guide/features/curator` is indexed.
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website/docs/user-guide/features/curator.md
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---
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sidebar_position: 3
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title: "Curator"
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description: "Background maintenance for agent-created skills — usage tracking, staleness, archival, and LLM-driven review"
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---
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# Curator
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The curator is a background maintenance pass for **agent-created skills**. It tracks how often each skill is viewed, used, and patched, moves long-unused skills through `active → stale → archived` states, and periodically spawns a short auxiliary-model review that proposes consolidations or patches drift.
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It exists so that skills created via the [self-improvement loop](/docs/user-guide/features/skills#agent-managed-skills-skill_manage-tool) don't pile up forever. Every time the agent solves a novel problem and saves a skill, that skill lands in `~/.hermes/skills/`. Without maintenance, you end up with dozens of narrow near-duplicates that pollute the catalog and waste tokens.
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The curator **never touches** bundled skills (shipped with the repo) or hub-installed skills (from [agentskills.io](https://agentskills.io)). It only reviews skills the agent itself authored. It also **never auto-deletes** — the worst outcome is archival into `~/.hermes/skills/.archive/`, which is recoverable.
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Tracks [issue #7816](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/7816).
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## How it runs
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The curator is triggered by an inactivity check, not a cron daemon. On CLI session start, and on a recurring tick inside the gateway's cron-ticker thread, Hermes checks whether:
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1. Enough time has passed since the last curator run (`interval_hours`, default **7 days**), and
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2. The agent has been idle long enough (`min_idle_hours`, default **2 hours**).
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If both are true, it spawns a background fork of `AIAgent` — the same pattern used by the memory/skill self-improvement nudges. The fork runs in its own prompt cache and never touches the active conversation.
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A run has two phases:
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1. **Automatic transitions** (deterministic, no LLM). Skills unused for `stale_after_days` (30) become `stale`; skills unused for `archive_after_days` (90) are moved to `~/.hermes/skills/.archive/`.
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2. **LLM review** (single aux-model pass, `max_iterations=8`). The forked agent surveys the agent-created skills, can read any of them with `skill_view`, and decides per-skill whether to keep, patch (via `skill_manage`), consolidate overlapping ones, or archive via the terminal tool.
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Pinned skills bypass all auto-transitions and the LLM is instructed not to touch them.
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## Configuration
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All settings live in `config.yaml` under `curator:` (not `.env` — this isn't a secret). Defaults:
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```yaml
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curator:
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enabled: true
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interval_hours: 168 # 7 days
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min_idle_hours: 2
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stale_after_days: 30
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archive_after_days: 90
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auxiliary:
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provider: null # null = use main auxiliary client resolution
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model: null
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```
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To disable entirely, set `curator.enabled: false`.
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To use a cheaper aux model for the LLM review pass instead of your main model, set `curator.auxiliary.provider` and `curator.auxiliary.model` to something specific (e.g. `openrouter` + `google/gemini-3-flash-preview`).
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## CLI
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```bash
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hermes curator status # last run, counts, pinned list, LRU top 5
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hermes curator run # trigger a review now (background by default)
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hermes curator run --sync # same, but block until the LLM pass finishes
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hermes curator pause # stop runs until resumed
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hermes curator resume
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hermes curator pin <skill> # never auto-transition this skill
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hermes curator unpin <skill>
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hermes curator restore <skill> # move an archived skill back to active
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```
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`hermes curator status` also lists the five least-recently-used skills — a quick way to see what's likely to become stale next.
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The same subcommands are available as the `/curator` slash command inside a running session (CLI or gateway platforms).
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## What "agent-created" means
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A skill is considered agent-created if its name is **not** in:
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- `~/.hermes/skills/.bundled_manifest` (skills copied from the repo on install), and
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- `~/.hermes/skills/.hub/lock.json` (skills installed via `hermes skills install`).
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Everything else in `~/.hermes/skills/` is fair game for the curator. This includes:
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- Skills the agent saved via `skill_manage(action="create")` during a conversation.
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- Skills you created manually with a hand-written `SKILL.md`.
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- Skills added via external skill directories you've pointed Hermes at.
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If you want to protect a specific skill from ever being touched — for example a hand-authored skill you rely on — use `hermes curator pin <name>`. The pin is a hard guarantee enforced at the shared mutation helper; no code path that would archive, consolidate, or state-transition a skill can bypass it.
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## Usage telemetry
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The curator maintains a sidecar at `~/.hermes/skills/.usage.json` with one entry per skill:
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```json
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{
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"my-skill": {
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"use_count": 12,
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"view_count": 34,
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"last_used_at": "2026-04-24T18:12:03Z",
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"last_viewed_at": "2026-04-23T09:44:17Z",
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"patch_count": 3,
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"last_patched_at": "2026-04-20T22:01:55Z",
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"created_at": "2026-03-01T14:20:00Z",
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"state": "active",
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"pinned": false,
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"archived_at": null
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}
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}
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```
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Counters increment when:
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- `view_count`: the agent calls `skill_view` on the skill.
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- `use_count`: the skill is loaded into a conversation's prompt.
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- `patch_count`: `skill_manage patch/edit/write_file/remove_file` runs on the skill.
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Bundled and hub-installed skills are explicitly excluded from telemetry writes.
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## Per-run reports
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Every curator run writes a timestamped directory under `~/.hermes/logs/curator/`:
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```
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~/.hermes/logs/curator/
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└── 20260429-111512/
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├── run.json # machine-readable: full fidelity, stats, LLM output
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└── REPORT.md # human-readable summary
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```
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`REPORT.md` is a quick way to see what a given run did — which skills transitioned, what the LLM reviewer said, which skills it patched. Good for auditing without having to grep `agent.log`.
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## Restoring an archived skill
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If the curator archived something you still want:
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```bash
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hermes curator restore <skill-name>
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```
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This moves the skill back from `~/.hermes/skills/.archive/` to the active tree and resets its state to `active`. The restore refuses if a bundled or hub-installed skill has since been installed under the same name (would shadow upstream).
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## Disabling per environment
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The curator is on by default. To turn it off:
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- **For one profile only:** edit `~/.hermes/config.yaml` (or the active profile's config) and set `curator.enabled: false`.
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- **For just one run:** `hermes curator pause` — the pause persists across sessions; use `resume` to re-enable.
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The curator also refuses to run if `min_idle_hours` hasn't elapsed, so on an active dev machine it naturally only runs during quiet stretches.
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## See also
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- [Skills System](/docs/user-guide/features/skills) — how skills work in general and the self-improvement loop that creates them
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- [Memory](/docs/user-guide/features/memory) — a parallel background review that maintains long-term memory
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- [Bundled Skills Catalog](/docs/reference/skills-catalog)
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- [Issue #7816](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/7816) — original proposal and design discussion
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