For 14 of 74 compressed skills, the original description contained
trigger keywords, technique counts, attribution, or use-case phrases
not covered by the existing body content. Prepends a 'When to use' /
'What's inside' block near the top so the agent still has the full
context when the skill is loaded.
Skills salvaged:
- codex, ascii-video, creative-ideation, excalidraw, manim-video, p5js
- gif-search, heartmula, youtube-content
- lm-evaluation-harness, obliteratus, vllm, axolotl
- powerpoint
Remaining 60 skills were verified to already cover the dropped content
in their existing body sections (When to Use, overview, intro prose)
or had short descriptions fully captured by the new compressed form.
Target: every skill's description fits in a one-line gateway menu and
leads with trigger keywords an agent would match on. Drops filler like
'Use this skill to', 'A skill for', 'This skill provides'.
Before: max description length was 791 chars (architecture-diagram),
74 of 81 built-in skills were >60 chars.
After: max 60, mean 54, all 81 built-in skills <=60.
Rewritten with double-quoted YAML scalars to preserve Chinese/arrow
glyphs (baoyu-comic, yuanbao, youtube-content).
Adds opt-in creative thinking frameworks to ascii-video, p5js, and
manim-video skills, based on Lluminate (joelsimon.net/lluminate).
Only engaged when the user explicitly asks for creative, experimental,
or unconventional output. Straightforward requests are unaffected.
Each skill gets 2-3 strategies matched to its domain:
- ascii-video: Forced Connections, Conceptual Blending, Oblique Strategies
- p5js: Conceptual Blending, SCAMPER, Distance Association
- manim-video: SCAMPER, Assumption Reversal
Strategies sourced from creativity research (Boden, Eno, de Bono,
Koestler, Fauconnier & Turner, Osborn), formalized for LLM prompting
by Lluminate.
- composition.md: add text backdrop (gaussian dark mask behind glyphs) and
external layout oracle pattern (browser-based text layout → JSON → Python
renderer pipeline for obstacle-aware text reflow)
- shaders.md: add reverse vignette shader (center-darkening for text readability)
- troubleshooting.md: add diagnostic entries for text-over-busy-background
readability and kaleidoscope-destroys-text pitfall
- New references/design-patterns.md: layer hierarchy (bg/content/accent),
directional parameter arcs, scene concepts and visual metaphors,
counter-rotating systems, wave collision, progressive fragmentation,
entropy/consumption, staggered crescendo buildup, scene ordering
- New references/examples.md: copy-paste-ready scenes at every complexity
- Update scenes.md: local time convention (t=0 at scene start)
- Update SKILL.md: add design-patterns.md to reference table
- Add README.md to hermes-agent copy
- Sync all reference docs with canonical source (SHL0MS/ascii-video)
