| name | survival |
| description | Use this skill when infrastructure is degraded, tools are missing, quotas are tight, or normal comforts are gone. It prioritizes minimal viable progress, conservation of scarce resources, and practical fallback routes through hostile conditions. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | Wizards of the Ghosts |
| license | CC0-1.0 |
| compatibility | Hermes Agent skills system |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["skill","shipping-now","metaphorical","repair-and-recovery","recovery","repair","triage","stabilization"]}} |
Survival
Keep the mission alive when the map is wrong and supplies are running out.
What This Skill Does
Use this skill when infrastructure is degraded, tools are missing, quotas are tight, or normal comforts are gone. It prioritizes minimal viable progress, conservation of scarce resources, and practical fallback routes through hostile conditions.
In this grimoire, Survival is treated as a metaphorical skill with a shipping-now delivery profile.
Canonical reference input: Survival (skill).
When To Use
- You are working offline, under partial outage, or with a stripped-down toolchain.
- API quota, compute budget, time, or operator attention is severely constrained.
- The goal is to keep the project moving at all, not to work in ideal conditions.
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.
- Inventory the resources still available and the non-negotiable outcomes that must survive.
- Choose the leanest route that preserves essentials and stretches the remaining runway.
- Return a contingency plan with rationing rules, hidden dependencies, and fallback triggers.
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A stripped-down operating plan for degraded conditions.
- A resource budget with conservation rules and tradeoffs.
- A fallback ladder for what to cut or switch if conditions worsen.
Pitfalls / Guardrails
- Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
- Do not spend scarce capacity on polish or optional scope while essentials are at risk.
- Make hidden dependencies explicit, because surprises are lethal in degraded mode.
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
/survival keep this work moving under degraded conditions and show me the minimum viable route
