The read-only org mirror broke the learning loop precisely where it matters
most. The system prompt tells every agent to patch a skill the moment it
finds a gap, and shared skills are the ones the most people use — but every
write to _org/ was refused, and the curator was excluded from them outright.
So org skills froze while personal skills kept improving, and the offered
alternative ("fork it into a personal skill, then propose the fork") is not
something an agent does mid-task. The refusal WAS the feature; improvements
were simply lost, and manual forks would have fragmented the shared set.
Edit in place:
- skill_manage patch/edit/write_file now work on org skills. Only delete is
still refused (the mirror is a view of org HEAD — a local delete returns on
the next pull; removing a shared skill is an admin action).
- Org skills are curation-eligible again, so the curator can improve the
highest-leverage skills in the system instead of skipping them.
- The load-time provenance header now says edits are allowed and kept,
instead of instructing the agent not to edit.
Local edits are never overwritten:
- pull_org_skills previously rmtree'd each skill dir and re-materialized it,
silently destroying local work on the next session start. It now records a
content fingerprint per skill (.org-baseline.json) when it writes one, and
SKIPS any skill whose local content diverges from that baseline.
- When upstream ALSO changed such a skill, it is reported in the pull
result's "conflicted" list and left untouched for the user to resolve
deliberately (propose the local version, or delete it and re-pull to take
theirs). A missing baseline is treated as unmodified so pre-existing
mirrors do not raise phantom conflicts.
- Fingerprints are content-based (path + bytes, sorted), so a touch/mtime
change is not mistaken for an edit.
Sharing back:
- Default: the edit stays local and the tool result tells the user to run
"hermes skills propose <skill>".
- Opt-in sync.org_auto_propose / HERMES_SYNC_ORG_AUTO_PROPOSE submits each
edit immediately. Defaults OFF — pushing every agent edit to a whole
organisation is not a safe default. A failed submission never fails the
edit; the change is saved and can be proposed later.
- "hermes sync status" lists org skills with unshared local edits;
"hermes sync pull" reports conflicts it declined to overwrite.
Tests: 25 in the namespace suite (was 15). The two that asserted the old
read-only behaviour now assert the opposite. New coverage for edit-applied,
share-back guidance, delete-still-refused, curation-allowed, edit detection,
missing-baseline tolerance, mtime-insensitivity, and the auto-propose
default. 428 passed / 0 failed via scripts/run_tests.sh.
Verified through the REAL pull path against a mock plane: pull v1 -> edit in
place -> upstream ships v2 -> pull leaves the local edit intact, reports the
conflict, and surfaces it in status.
981feb6730