agent-config-audit

name	agent-config-audit
description	Weekly red-light audit of Hermes Agent's own config. Triggers on agent slow / dumber over time, duplicate injection, zombie skills, state drift, monitor lying.
version	0.1.0
author	Hermes
license	MIT
platforms	["linux","macos"]
metadata	{"hermes":{"tags":["audit","health-check","config","drift","zombie-skills","injection-budget","monitoring"],"related_skills":["skill-authoring","hermes-skill-curation","hermes-memory-routing"]}}

Agent Config Audit

A weekly self-audit of Hermes Agent's own configuration. The agent's context-injection overhead, skill count, state stores, and monitor fidelity all drift over time; this skill runs 14 fact-based checks and exits non-zero on red. Machines verify, humans only look at reds.

The premise (from the original post): an agent that gets slower or "dumber" is almost never a model problem — it is being fed contradictory, duplicated, or stale instructions. The cure is metabolism, not a stronger model.

When to Use

Trigger this skill on any of these signals (user or self-detected):

• "AI 变笨了" / "agent 变慢了" / "变笨" / "回答质量下降"
• "每次对话的固定开销太大" / "上下文越来越长"
• "技能太多" / "好多 skill 没用过" / "想清理 skill"
• "规则打架" / "两条规则冲突" / "AI 不知道听谁的"
• "监控说一切正常但其实不对" / "绿灯骗人"
• "上次跑是 X 天前" / "需要体检" / "周检" / "全面体检"
• "agent 配置审计" / "agent config audit"
• Schedule: every Sunday via cronjob (see §"Schedule")

Do not use this skill for: per-request debugging (use terminal directly), one-off file lookups (search_files), or skill-library reorganization — that is hermes-skill-curation.

Prerequisites

• $HERMES_HOME defaults to ~/.local/share/hermes (your user's Guix-configs deployment puts it there, not ~/.hermes/). Override with HERMES_HOME=/path hermes-config-audit.
• bash ≥4, python3 ≥3.9, find, du, wc, stat, awk, grep — all stdlib for a normal Linux install.
• trash-cli (your ~/.local/bin/trash-put) only if a check recommends a deletion — never invoked automatically.

How to Run

# One-shot audit (prints red/yellow/green per check, exits non-zero on red)
~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh

# JSON output (for piping into a cron deliverable or a delegate_task)
~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh --json

# Custom budgets
HERMES_INJECTION_BUDGET_KB=30 SKILL_COUNT_BUDGET=180 \
  ~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh

# Tighter budget for a smaller profile
HERMES_HOME=~/.local/share/hermes/profiles/minimal \
  INJECTION_BUDGET_KB=15 SKILL_COUNT_BUDGET=60 \
  ~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh

Exit codes (use these in cron + notify_on_complete):

Code	Meaning	Cron action
0	All green	Silent (no delivery)
1	At least one yellow	Optional: log only
2	At least one red	Deliver to user (the whole point)

The principle: machines verify, humans only look at reds. Green output is suppressed in cron delivery.

Quick Reference

Thing	Where
Edit budgets	scripts/health-check.sh env vars at top + env overrides
14 checks, full spec	references/14-checks.md
Per-check detection method	references/14-checks.md (same file, per-section)
Schedule via cron	cronjob(action='create', schedule='0 9 * * 0', script=...)
Customize a check	patch scripts/health-check.sh (the file IS the procedure)
Symlink to your bin	ln -s ../skills/.../scripts/health-check.sh ~/.local/bin/hermes-audit

Procedure

1. Pick the trigger. Match the user's wording (or self-detected signal) against "When to Use" above. If unclear, ask one clarify with choices=["weekly scheduled run", "one-shot ad-hoc audit", "diagnose a specific symptom"] — do not enumerate inside the question string.

2. Run the script. Invoke through the terminal tool:

   ~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh
   

   Stdout is the canonical report. The script writes nothing to disk on green; on red it appends a single line to $HERMES_HOME/audit/last-red.log for diffing across runs.

3. Read the report top-down, reds first. Each line is one of:

   • 🔴 RED <check>: <evidence> — needs human action
   • 🟡 YEL <check>: <evidence> — watch, not urgent
   • 🟢 GRN <check> — silent (suppressed in cron delivery)

   The evidence string is the fact — file path, byte count, count diff, etc. Don't paraphrase it; show it to the user verbatim.

4. Map red → action. Each check in references/14-checks.md has a "What to do" subsection. Common resolutions:

   • duplicate injection → trash-put the duplicate (or merge)
   • zombie skills → hermes-skill-curation (it owns that domain)
   • JSON parse error → python3 -m json.tool <file> to locate
   • monitor lies → trust the timestamp probe, not the report
   • secret in plaintext → trash-put + re-encrypt via secrets helper in your Guix-configs repo

5. Schedule the weekly run (if user wants recurrence):

   cronjob(
     action="create",
     name="agent-config-audit-weekly",
     schedule="0 9 * * 0",            # Sunday 09:00 local
     script="~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh",
     no_agent=True,                    # the script IS the job
     deliver="origin",
   )
   

   no_agent=True is critical: the script is watchdog-style, its stdout is the message. Empty stdout = silent (no false alarms). Non-zero exit = error alert (so a broken audit can't fail silently — that would itself be a "monitor lies" violation).

6. Track drift over time. After every red, append a dated note to $HERMES_HOME/audit/history.log (the script does this automatically on red). The shape of which checks go red over weeks is more diagnostic than any single run.

Pitfalls

• Don't trust hermes skills list as the source of truth for skill count. The bundled manifest + hub lockfiles can disagree with the filesystem. Check #2 enumerates via find ... -name SKILL.md instead.
• Don't auto-delete on red. The script reports; you decide. Use trash-put, never rm/rm -rf (your standing preference). hermes-skill-curation is the skill for structural cleanup; this skill is the watchdog.
• Don't conflate ~/.local/share/hermes/Trash/ with the XDG ~/.local/share/Trash/. They are two different trash directories. trash-put uses XDG.
• A green run is not a "system healthy" guarantee. It only proves the 14 specific facts the script checks. The original post's whole point is that monitors are incomplete — extend the script when a new failure mode appears, don't disable checks.
• The script reads $HERMES_HOME, not ~/.hermes/. Your Guix deployment pins it at ~/.local/share/hermes; if you copy this skill to a fresh install, the env-var override is the first thing to check.
• Secret redaction in cron delivery. If you wire deliver="origin", the cron framework auto-redacts obvious API keys, but a leak through check #14 (plaintext secrets) is the one case where the redacted message is the alert itself — consider deliver="local" and a separate human-pull channel for the secret-leak red.
• Schedule drift on laptops. A Sunday 09:00 cron on a sleeping laptop will not fire. Pair with kanban.failure_limit semantics or a separate hermes cron run weekly manual.

Verification

Run it once and confirm the output shape:

~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh
echo "exit=$?"
# Expected: 14 lines, each starting with 🔴/🟡/🟢, exit 0/1/2

Then force one check red to prove the alerting path works:

# Temporarily tighten the budget
INJECTION_BUDGET_KB=1 ~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh
echo "exit=$?"  # Expected: 2 (red on check #1)

If --json round-trips, the cron deliverable will work:

~/.local/share/hermes/skills/hermes-agent-ops/agent-config-audit/scripts/health-check.sh --json | python3 -m json.tool

---

Source: distilled from a 2026-07-06 public post on agent self-audit ("AI 每次开工前要吞下 39KB 互相矛盾的指令—— 它不是变笨 了，是被喂笨的"). 14-check list, red/yellow/green semantics, and the "machine verifies, human only looks at red" principle are verbatim from that post.