| name | hermes-curator |
| description | Use when setting up, tuning, or reviewing Hermes Curator for skill compaction, stale skill detection, context hygiene, token savings, generated-skill cleanup, and prevention of skill bloat or context rot. |
Hermes Curator
Use this to keep Hermes skills useful, compact, and low-noise.
Purpose
Hermes can generate or accumulate skills over time. Curator prevents context rot by identifying unused or low-value skills and eventually removing them, depending on retention policy.
Setup Flow
- Update Hermes to the latest version before enabling curator features.
- Check curator status.
- Confirm default stale/delete thresholds.
- Keep conservative defaults unless there is a clear reason:
- Mark unused skills stale after a moderate idle window.
- Delete only after a longer idle window.
- Verify the curator is enabled and scheduled/running.
Review Rules
Before deleting a skill:
- Check last used date.
- Check whether the skill is project-critical but rarely triggered.
- Preserve skills tied to compliance, security, backups, or recovery.
- Prefer marking stale before deleting.
Good Curator Behavior
- Compacts duplicated generated skills.
- Flags stale skills.
- Reduces token cost.
- Keeps high-signal project and domain skills.
- Avoids deleting hand-authored source-of-truth skills without review.
Safety Rules
- Back up skills before enabling automatic deletion.
- Never let curator modify Git-backed source packs without a backup or commit.
- Treat deletion as reversible only if backups are working.
Source Notes
Distilled from the user-provided "seven levels of Hermes Agent" transcript, level 3.
