hermes-curator

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

1. Update Hermes to the latest version before enabling curator features.
2. Check curator status.
3. Confirm default stale/delete thresholds.
4. 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.
5. 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.