| name | detect-magic |
| description | Use this skill when you need a fast, structured scan for where the real magic is hiding in a repo, workflow, or system. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | Wizards of the Ghosts |
| license | CC0-1.0 |
| compatibility | Hermes Agent skills system |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["spell","shipping-now","metaphorical","investigation-and-preparation","analysis","discovery","translation","preflight"]}} |
Detect Magic
Surface hidden AI affordances, agents, automations, and tool hooks before acting.
What This Skill Does
Use this skill when you need a fast, structured scan for where the real magic is hiding in a repo, workflow, or system.
In this grimoire, Detect Magic is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile.
Canonical reference input: Detect Magic (spell).
When To Use
- You need a preflight scan of a repo or system before making any changes.
- You need to map where automation, model behavior, and side effects actually live.
- You want to inventory hidden capability surfaces: model providers, tool registries, shell bridges, webhooks, schedulers.
- You need to identify surprising affordances, dangerous edges, or missing observability.
- The request involves AI tooling, agents, starter kits, or model behavior scanning.
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 obvious entrypoints: README, package manifests, setup docs, scripts/, CI/CD folders, env templates.
- Trace outward to hidden capability surfaces: model providers, tool registries, function-calling schemas, MCP config, plugin loaders, shell bridges.
- Identify background jobs, cron, schedulers, queues, workers, webhooks, event consumers, notification hooks.
- Call out surprising affordances, dangerous edges, missing observability, and fan-out points.
- Return a compact map of confirmed mechanisms, inferred mechanisms, and unknowns needing follow-up.
- Separate confirmed findings from inference every time — use explicit uncertainty language.
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A concise capability inventory mapping all discovered execution surfaces.
- A risk list covering hidden side effects or untrusted execution paths.
- A shortlist of follow-up skills or next actions (e.g. $identify, $zone-of-truth, $glyph-of-warding).
Pitfalls / Guardrails
- Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
- Do not claim magic where there is only speculation — separate proof from suspicion.
- Do not execute risky hooks, automations, deploys, rollbacks, webhooks, or billing mutations just to prove they exist.
- Treat dependency or environment artifacts carefully — a binary suggests tooling is installed but does not prove the repo ships that capability.
- Use explicit uncertainty language: Confirmed, Inferred not confirmed, Unknown from repo evidence.
- Do not drift into generic security-review prose — sound like a structured capability-scan ritual.
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
/detect-magic scan this repo for hidden AI tooling, agents, MCP servers, and automation hooks before we change anything
