hermes-agent/website/docs/reference/optional-skills-catalog.md
Teknium 73bccc94c7
skills: consolidate mlops redundancies (gguf+llama-cpp, grpo+trl, guidance→optional) (#11965)
Three tightly-scoped built-in skill consolidations to reduce redundancy in
the available_skills listing injected into every system prompt:

1. gguf-quantization → llama-cpp (merged)
   GGUF is llama.cpp's format; two skills covered the same toolchain. The
   merged llama-cpp skill keeps the full K-quant table + imatrix workflow
   from gguf and the ROCm/benchmarks/supported-models sections from the
   original llama-cpp. All 5 reference files preserved.

2. grpo-rl-training → fine-tuning-with-trl (folded in)
   GRPO isn't a framework, it's a trainer inside TRL. Moved the 17KB
   deep-dive SKILL.md to references/grpo-training.md and the working
   template to templates/basic_grpo_training.py. TRL's GRPO workflow
   section now points to both. Atropos skill's related_skills updated.

3. guidance → optional-skills/mlops/
   Dropped from built-in. Outlines (still built-in) covers the same
   structured-generation ground with wider adoption. Listed in the
   optional catalog for users who specifically want Guidance.

Net: 3 fewer built-in skill lines in every system prompt, zero content
loss. Contributor authorship preserved via git rename detection.
2026-04-17 21:36:40 -07:00

9.8 KiB

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9 Optional Skills Catalog Official optional skills shipped with hermes-agent — install via hermes skills install official/<category>/<skill>

Optional Skills Catalog

Official optional skills ship with the hermes-agent repository under optional-skills/ but are not active by default. Install them explicitly:

hermes skills install official/<category>/<skill>

For example:

hermes skills install official/blockchain/solana
hermes skills install official/mlops/flash-attention

Once installed, the skill appears in the agent's skill list and can be loaded automatically when relevant tasks are detected.

To uninstall:

hermes skills uninstall <skill-name>

Autonomous AI Agents

Skill Description
blackbox Delegate coding tasks to Blackbox AI CLI agent. Multi-model agent with built-in judge that runs tasks through multiple LLMs and picks the best result.
honcho Configure and use Honcho memory with Hermes — cross-session user modeling, multi-profile peer isolation, observation config, and dialectic reasoning.

Blockchain

Skill Description
base Query Base (Ethereum L2) blockchain data with USD pricing — wallet balances, token info, transaction details, gas analysis, contract inspection, whale detection, and live network stats. No API key required.
solana Query Solana blockchain data with USD pricing — wallet balances, token portfolios, transaction details, NFTs, whale detection, and live network stats. No API key required.

Communication

Skill Description
one-three-one-rule Structured communication framework for proposals and decision-making.

Creative

Skill Description
blender-mcp Control Blender directly from Hermes via socket connection to the blender-mcp addon. Create 3D objects, materials, animations, and run arbitrary Blender Python (bpy) code.
concept-diagrams Generate flat, minimal light/dark-aware SVG diagrams as standalone HTML files, using a unified educational visual language (9 semantic color ramps, automatic dark mode). Best for physics setups, chemistry mechanisms, math curves, physical objects (aircraft, turbines, smartphones), floor plans, cross-sections, lifecycle/process narratives, and hub-spoke system diagrams. Ships with 15 example diagrams.
meme-generation Generate real meme images by picking a template and overlaying text with Pillow. Produces actual .png meme files.

DevOps

Skill Description
cli Run 150+ AI apps via inference.sh CLI (infsh) — image generation, video creation, LLMs, search, 3D, and social automation.
docker-management Manage Docker containers, images, volumes, networks, and Compose stacks — lifecycle ops, debugging, cleanup, and Dockerfile optimization.

Email

Skill Description
agentmail Give the agent its own dedicated email inbox via AgentMail. Send, receive, and manage email autonomously using agent-owned email addresses.

Health

Skill Description
neuroskill-bci Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) integration for neuroscience research workflows.

MCP

Skill Description
fastmcp Build, test, inspect, install, and deploy MCP servers with FastMCP in Python. Covers wrapping APIs or databases as MCP tools, exposing resources or prompts, and deployment.

Migration

Skill Description
openclaw-migration Migrate a user's OpenClaw customization footprint into Hermes Agent. Imports memories, SOUL.md, command allowlists, user skills, and selected workspace assets.

MLOps

The largest optional category — covers the full ML pipeline from data curation to production inference.

Skill Description
accelerate Simplest distributed training API. 4 lines to add distributed support to any PyTorch script. Unified API for DeepSpeed/FSDP/Megatron/DDP.
chroma Open-source embedding database. Store embeddings and metadata, perform vector and full-text search. Simple 4-function API for RAG and semantic search.
faiss Facebook's library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors. Supports billions of vectors, GPU acceleration, and various index types (Flat, IVF, HNSW).
flash-attention Optimize transformer attention with Flash Attention for 2-4x speedup and 10-20x memory reduction. Supports PyTorch SDPA, flash-attn library, H100 FP8, and sliding window.
guidance Control LLM output with regex and grammars, guarantee valid JSON/XML/code generation, enforce structured formats, and build multi-step workflows with Guidance — Microsoft Research's constrained generation framework.
hermes-atropos-environments Build, test, and debug Hermes Agent RL environments for Atropos training. Covers the HermesAgentBaseEnv interface, reward functions, agent loop integration, and evaluation.
huggingface-tokenizers Fast Rust-based tokenizers for research and production. Tokenizes 1GB in under 20 seconds. Supports BPE, WordPiece, and Unigram algorithms.
instructor Extract structured data from LLM responses with Pydantic validation, retry failed extractions automatically, and stream partial results.
lambda-labs Reserved and on-demand GPU cloud instances for ML training and inference. SSH access, persistent filesystems, and multi-node clusters.
llava Large Language and Vision Assistant — visual instruction tuning and image-based conversations combining CLIP vision with LLaMA language models.
nemo-curator GPU-accelerated data curation for LLM training. Fuzzy deduplication (16x faster), quality filtering (30+ heuristics), semantic dedup, PII redaction. Scales with RAPIDS.
pinecone Managed vector database for production AI. Auto-scaling, hybrid search (dense + sparse), metadata filtering, and low latency (under 100ms p95).
pytorch-lightning High-level PyTorch framework with Trainer class, automatic distributed training (DDP/FSDP/DeepSpeed), callbacks, and minimal boilerplate.
qdrant High-performance vector similarity search engine. Rust-powered with fast nearest neighbor search, hybrid search with filtering, and scalable vector storage.
saelens Train and analyze Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) using SAELens to decompose neural network activations into interpretable features.
simpo Simple Preference Optimization — reference-free alternative to DPO with better performance (+6.4 pts on AlpacaEval 2.0). No reference model needed.
slime LLM post-training with RL using Megatron+SGLang framework. Custom data generation workflows and tight Megatron-LM integration for RL scaling.
tensorrt-llm Optimize LLM inference with NVIDIA TensorRT for maximum throughput. 10-100x faster than PyTorch on A100/H100 with quantization (FP8/INT4) and in-flight batching.
torchtitan PyTorch-native distributed LLM pretraining with 4D parallelism (FSDP2, TP, PP, CP). Scale from 8 to 512+ GPUs with Float8 and torch.compile.

Productivity

Skill Description
canvas Canvas LMS integration — fetch enrolled courses and assignments using API token authentication.
memento-flashcards Spaced repetition flashcard system for learning and knowledge retention.
siyuan SiYuan Note API for searching, reading, creating, and managing blocks and documents in a self-hosted knowledge base.
telephony Give Hermes phone capabilities — provision a Twilio number, send/receive SMS/MMS, make calls, and place AI-driven outbound calls through Bland.ai or Vapi.

Research

Skill Description
bioinformatics Gateway to 400+ bioinformatics skills from bioSkills and ClawBio. Covers genomics, transcriptomics, single-cell, variant calling, pharmacogenomics, metagenomics, and structural biology.
domain-intel Passive domain reconnaissance using Python stdlib. Subdomain discovery, SSL certificate inspection, WHOIS lookups, DNS records, and bulk multi-domain analysis. No API keys required.
duckduckgo-search Free web search via DuckDuckGo — text, news, images, videos. No API key needed.
gitnexus-explorer Index a codebase with GitNexus and serve an interactive knowledge graph via web UI and Cloudflare tunnel.
parallel-cli Vendor skill for Parallel CLI — agent-native web search, extraction, deep research, enrichment, and monitoring.
qmd Search personal knowledge bases, notes, docs, and meeting transcripts locally using qmd — a hybrid retrieval engine with BM25, vector search, and LLM reranking.
scrapling Web scraping with Scrapling — HTTP fetching, stealth browser automation, Cloudflare bypass, and spider crawling via CLI and Python.

Security

Skill Description
1password Set up and use 1Password CLI (op). Install the CLI, enable desktop app integration, sign in, and read/inject secrets for commands.
oss-forensics Open-source software forensics — analyze packages, dependencies, and supply chain risks.
sherlock OSINT username search across 400+ social networks. Hunt down social media accounts by username.

Contributing Optional Skills

To add a new optional skill to the repository:

  1. Create a directory under optional-skills/<category>/<skill-name>/
  2. Add a SKILL.md with standard frontmatter (name, description, version, author)
  3. Include any supporting files in references/, templates/, or scripts/ subdirectories
  4. Submit a pull request — the skill will appear in this catalog once merged