talk-normal

# talk-normal A curated system prompt that stops your LLM from writing like a LinkedIn post. Measured: 73% character reduction on GPT-4o-mini, 72% on GPT-5.4, across 10 prompts in English and Chinese, without losing information. ## When to Use Run the installer once per workspace to make your Hermes agent permanently less verbose. This is not a per-turn skill — it is a one-time installer that injects always-on rules into your project's context file. ## Procedure To install or update talk-normal in the current workspace: ```bash bash install.sh ``` The script auto-detects your workspace config file (`.hermes.md`, `HERMES.md`, or `AGENTS.md`) and injects the prompt between `# --- talk-normal BEGIN ---` and `# --- talk-normal END ---` markers. The installer is idempotent: running it again replaces the existing talk-normal block in place with the latest rules. Nothing else in your config file is touched. To remove: ```bash bash install.sh --uninstall ``` Start a new Hermes session to take effect. ## What gets installed The contents of `prompt.md` get injected into your workspace config file. The rules target the specific slop patterns that make LLM output sound corporate and padded: - **Filler and hedging** — banned opening phrases, no throat-clearing, no restating the question - **Structural discipline** — lead with the answer, match depth to complexity, bullets only when genuinely parallel - **Closing patterns** — no summary stamps, no hypothetical follow-up offers, no conditional next-step menus - **Rhetorical tics** — no negation-based contrastive framing, no plain-language restatements - **Shape of comparisons** — give a recommendation with brief reasoning, cap pros/cons lists ## Verification After installing, start a new Hermes session and ask a simple question like "What is Python?". The response should be 3-5 sentences with no filler phrases. Compare against the benchmarks at https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normal for expected output. ## Pitfalls - **Security scanner**: Hermes flags this skill as "DANGEROUS" because it modifies `AGENTS.md` (persistent prompt modification). This is expected — the skill's entire purpose is injecting always-on prompt rules. Install with `hermes skills install --force hexiecs/talk-normal/skill-hermes`. - Rules only take effect in a **new session** — Hermes freezes context files at session start. - If you have both `.hermes.md` and `AGENTS.md`, the installer writes to whichever it finds first (`.hermes.md` > `HERMES.md` > `AGENTS.md`). ## Upstream and issues - Source: https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normal - Issues and rule suggestions: https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normal/issues