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).
When a skill declares required_environment_variables in its YAML
frontmatter, missing env vars trigger a secure TUI prompt (identical
to the sudo password widget) when the skill is loaded. Secrets flow
directly to ~/.hermes/.env, never entering LLM context.
Key changes:
- New required_environment_variables frontmatter field for skills
- Secure TUI widget (masked input, 120s timeout)
- Gateway safety: messaging platforms show local setup guidance
- Legacy prerequisites.env_vars normalized into new format
- Remote backend handling: conservative setup_needed=True
- Env var name validation, file permissions hardened to 0o600
- Redact patterns extended for secret-related JSON fields
- 12 existing skills updated with prerequisites declarations
- ~48 new tests covering skip, timeout, gateway, remote backends
- Dynamic panel widget sizing (fixes hardcoded width from original PR)
Cherry-picked from PR #723 by kshitijk4poor, rebased onto current main
with conflict resolution.
Fixes#688
Co-authored-by: kshitijk4poor <kshitijk4poor@users.noreply.github.com>
