| name | animal-friendship |
| description | Animal Friendship is the first-contact spell for unfamiliar APIs, vendors, and services. It treats integration work as relationship-building: learn the temperament, respect the boundaries, and earn a stable exchange before asking for anything ambitious. The goal is not domination but trustable cooperation. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | Wizards of the Ghosts |
| license | CC0-1.0 |
| compatibility | Hermes Agent skills system |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["spell","shipping-now","metaphorical","actions-access-and-automation","execution","automation","access","actuation"]}} |
Animal Friendship
Approach a strange service gently until it stops biting.
What This Skill Does
Animal Friendship is the first-contact spell for unfamiliar APIs, vendors, and services. It treats integration work as relationship-building: learn the temperament, respect the boundaries, and earn a stable exchange before asking for anything ambitious. The goal is not domination but trustable cooperation.
In this grimoire, Animal Friendship is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile.
Canonical reference input: Animal Friendship (spell).
When To Use
- You are integrating with an API or service you have never used before.
- The docs are incomplete, contradictory, or too polished to trust blindly.
- You want the smallest successful handshake before building deeper dependencies.
Prerequisites
- No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.
Procedure
- Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
- Profile the system's habits: auth model, rate limits, failure modes, and supported operations.
- Establish a safe first interaction, preferably read-only or against a sandbox.
- Return a cooperation plan covering the first useful call, the next expansion steps, and the boundaries you should not cross.
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A low-risk integration handshake plan.
- A shortlist of quirks, quotas, and trust boundaries.
- A recommended next request that proves the relationship is real.
Pitfalls / Guardrails
- Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
- Do not brute-force unfamiliar endpoints, credentials, or undocumented behavior.
- Prefer sandbox, test, or read-only access until the system has proven predictable.
Verification
- Check that the result includes every deliverable promised above.
- Check that confirmed facts, assumptions, and inferences are visibly separated.
- Check that the metaphor still maps cleanly to a real operational mechanism.
Example Invocation
/animal-friendship help me establish a safe first working relationship with this unfamiliar API or service
