| name | bestow-curse |
| description | Bestow Curse saddles a target with a lasting disadvantage. The real-world version is constraint injection: deliberately adding friction, limitations, or handicaps to see how a system, process, or team adapts. This is the skill of resilience testing through artificial adversity — bandwidth throttling, feature removal, resource reduction. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | Wizards of the Ghosts |
| license | CC0-1.0 |
| compatibility | Hermes Agent skills system |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["spell","prototype","metaphorical","influence-and-behavior","influence","behavior","attention","engagement"]}} |
Bestow Curse
Add persistent constraints or friction to test how a system copes.
What This Skill Does
Bestow Curse saddles a target with a lasting disadvantage. The real-world version is constraint injection: deliberately adding friction, limitations, or handicaps to see how a system, process, or team adapts. This is the skill of resilience testing through artificial adversity — bandwidth throttling, feature removal, resource reduction.
In this grimoire, Bestow Curse is treated as a metaphorical spell with a prototype delivery profile.
Canonical reference input: Bestow Curse (spell).
When To Use
- You want to test how a system performs under degraded conditions before those conditions occur naturally.
- A process is too dependent on ideal circumstances and you need to know its failure boundaries.
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.
- Identify the system or process to stress-test through constraint injection.
- Design the curse: what specific limitation, degradation, or friction to introduce.
- Define the measurement criteria: how will you know if the system coped well or poorly?
- Deliver the constraint injection plan with expected outcomes and rollback procedures.
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A constraint injection plan: what to degrade, by how much, for how long.
- Success and failure criteria: what coping looks like vs. what breaking looks like.
Pitfalls / Guardrails
- Call out the glue, permissions, or missing infrastructure before you imply this is fully operational.
- Constraint injection must be reversible. The curse should reveal weaknesses, not create permanent damage.
- Do not inject constraints into production systems without authorization and rollback plans.
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.
- Check that any missing glue code, permissions, or future work is labeled before the skill is treated as ready.
Example Invocation
/bestow-curse design a constraint injection test for this [system/process]. What happens when we deliberately degrade it?
