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.

website/docs/user-guide/features/curator.md

@@ -0,0 +1,151 @@
+---
+sidebar_position: 3
+title: "Curator"
+description: "Background maintenance for agent-created skills — usage tracking, staleness, archival, and LLM-driven review"
+---
+
+# Curator
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Tracks [issue #7816](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/7816).
+
+## How it runs
+
+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:
+
+1. Enough time has passed since the last curator run (`interval_hours`, default **7 days**), and
+2. The agent has been idle long enough (`min_idle_hours`, default **2 hours**).
+
+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.
+
+A run has two phases:
+
+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/`.
+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.
+
+Pinned skills bypass all auto-transitions and the LLM is instructed not to touch them.
+
+## Configuration
+
+All settings live in `config.yaml` under `curator:` (not `.env` — this isn't a secret). Defaults:
+
+```yaml
+curator:
+  enabled: true
+  interval_hours: 168          # 7 days
+  min_idle_hours: 2
+  stale_after_days: 30
+  archive_after_days: 90
+  auxiliary:
+    provider: null             # null = use main auxiliary client resolution
+    model: null
+```
+
+To disable entirely, set `curator.enabled: false`.
+
+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`).
+
+## CLI
+
+```bash
+hermes curator status         # last run, counts, pinned list, LRU top 5
+hermes curator run            # trigger a review now (background by default)
+hermes curator run --sync     # same, but block until the LLM pass finishes
+hermes curator pause          # stop runs until resumed
+hermes curator resume
+hermes curator pin <skill>    # never auto-transition this skill
+hermes curator unpin <skill>
+hermes curator restore <skill>  # move an archived skill back to active
+```
+
+`hermes curator status` also lists the five least-recently-used skills — a quick way to see what's likely to become stale next.
+
+The same subcommands are available as the `/curator` slash command inside a running session (CLI or gateway platforms).
+
+## What "agent-created" means
+
+A skill is considered agent-created if its name is **not** in:
+
+- `~/.hermes/skills/.bundled_manifest` (skills copied from the repo on install), and
+- `~/.hermes/skills/.hub/lock.json` (skills installed via `hermes skills install`).
+
+Everything else in `~/.hermes/skills/` is fair game for the curator. This includes:
+
+- Skills the agent saved via `skill_manage(action="create")` during a conversation.
+- Skills you created manually with a hand-written `SKILL.md`.
+- Skills added via external skill directories you've pointed Hermes at.
+
+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.
+
+## Usage telemetry
+
+The curator maintains a sidecar at `~/.hermes/skills/.usage.json` with one entry per skill:
+
+```json
+{
+  "my-skill": {
+    "use_count": 12,
+    "view_count": 34,
+    "last_used_at": "2026-04-24T18:12:03Z",
+    "last_viewed_at": "2026-04-23T09:44:17Z",
+    "patch_count": 3,
+    "last_patched_at": "2026-04-20T22:01:55Z",
+    "created_at": "2026-03-01T14:20:00Z",
+    "state": "active",
+    "pinned": false,
+    "archived_at": null
+  }
+}
+```
+
+Counters increment when:
+
+- `view_count`: the agent calls `skill_view` on the skill.
+- `use_count`: the skill is loaded into a conversation's prompt.
+- `patch_count`: `skill_manage patch/edit/write_file/remove_file` runs on the skill.
+
+Bundled and hub-installed skills are explicitly excluded from telemetry writes.
+
+## Per-run reports
+
+Every curator run writes a timestamped directory under `~/.hermes/logs/curator/`:
+
+```
+~/.hermes/logs/curator/
+└── 20260429-111512/
+    ├── run.json      # machine-readable: full fidelity, stats, LLM output
+    └── REPORT.md     # human-readable summary
+```
+
+`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`.
+
+## Restoring an archived skill
+
+If the curator archived something you still want:
+
+```bash
+hermes curator restore <skill-name>
+```
+
+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).
+
+## Disabling per environment
+
+The curator is on by default. To turn it off:
+
+- **For one profile only:** edit `~/.hermes/config.yaml` (or the active profile's config) and set `curator.enabled: false`.
+- **For just one run:** `hermes curator pause` — the pause persists across sessions; use `resume` to re-enable.
+
+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.
+
+## See also
+
+- [Skills System](/docs/user-guide/features/skills) — how skills work in general and the self-improvement loop that creates them
+- [Memory](/docs/user-guide/features/memory) — a parallel background review that maintains long-term memory
+- [Bundled Skills Catalog](/docs/reference/skills-catalog)
+- [Issue #7816](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/7816) — original proposal and design discussion

website/docusaurus.config.ts

@@ -40,6 +40,19 @@ const config: Config = {
         // Disabled: appends ?_highlight=... to URLs (before the #anchor),
         // which makes copy/pasted doc links ugly. Ctrl+F on the page is fine.
         highlightSearchTermsOnTargetPage: false,
+        // Exclude the auto-generated per-skill catalog pages from search.
+        // There are hundreds of them and they dominate results for generic
+        // terms, drowning out the real user-guide / reference docs.
+        // The two human-written catalog indexes (reference/skills-catalog,
+        // reference/optional-skills-catalog) remain indexed.
+        //
+        // Note: ignoreFiles matches `route` (baseUrl stripped, no leading
+        // slash). With baseUrl '/docs/', `/docs/user-guide/skills/bundled/x`
+        // becomes 'user-guide/skills/bundled/x'.
+        ignoreFiles: [
+          /^user-guide\/skills\/bundled\//,
+          /^user-guide\/skills\/optional\//,
+        ],
       }),
     ],
   ],

website/sidebars.ts

@@ -44,6 +44,7 @@ const sidebars: SidebarsConfig = {
           items: [
             'user-guide/features/tools',
             'user-guide/features/skills',
+            'user-guide/features/curator',
             'user-guide/features/memory',
             'user-guide/features/memory-providers',
             'user-guide/features/context-files',