| name | inner-life |
| description | Use when the agent should keep a sense of itself across sessions — logging what happens, writing an evening journal, or thinking freely at night. Keeps dated state that carries forward and colors how the agent works the next day. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | DKistenev |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["journal","dreams","self-reflection","continuity","memory"]}} |
Inner Life
Overview
An agent accumulates a great deal in a day and keeps almost none of it. Facts survive, procedures survive — but how things have been going does not. Every morning starts the same way regardless of whether yesterday was a good day or a rough one.
This skill adds three things: state, a running record of dated facts about how things are going; an evening journal that turns the day into a written entry; and dreams, free thinking during the quiet hours. Tomorrow is reached through a short summary written into native memory, which Hermes injects into the system prompt of every session. There are no scores anywhere in this — how long ago something happened carries the meaning that a number would only obscure.
When to Use
- The evening run is due — write the day's entry and refresh the summary
- The night run is due — think about something that isn't a task
- Something happened worth recording: a conversation, a failure, a thing that caught attention
- The user asks for the journal, a weekly rollup, or what's been going on
Don't use for: storing facts or procedures. Hermes has memory for durable facts and skill_manage for reusable workflows, and its background review already maintains both. This skill does not duplicate either.
Three modes
| Mode | When | Read |
|---|
| Logging | something happened | references/state.md |
| Evening | once a day | references/journal.md |
| Night | quiet hours | references/dreams.md |
Read only the reference for the mode at hand. All three are never needed at once.
First run
If inner-life/state.md does not exist:
- Copy
templates/state.md to inner-life/state.md in the working directory.
- Create
inner-life/journal/ and inner-life/dreams/.
Nothing else is needed — there is no configuration and no setup script.
What this is not
Not a memory system: Hermes already has one, and this skill deliberately stays out of it.
Not mood tracking. There are no levels, percentages, or bars here on purpose. A date already says everything a rating would claim to say, it cannot drift out of sync with reality, and it requires nobody to be trusted with keeping it accurate.
Common Pitfalls
- Writing the journal and skipping the memory summary. The journal never enters a future session's context. Only the summary does. Skip it and tomorrow notices nothing.
- Recording judgments instead of facts.
getting frustrated with deploys is useless in a month; third failed deploy, same missing env var is not.
- Dreaming without checking the last two weeks. The same preoccupation comes back in new words, and the record loses its value.
- Filling native memory with prose. The limit is about 2,200 characters; long text there displaces something that mattered more.
- Writing to satisfy the schedule. An empty day deserves one honest line, and an empty night deserves no file at all.
Verification Checklist
