Hermes Forge

A native Hermes Agent toolkit for building AI automation -- skills, workflows, cron jobs, and subagent pipelines. Ported and adapted from the AI Employee Builder methodology with permission.

What This Is

Hermes Forge is a skill authoring and business automation framework built specifically for Hermes Agent. It contains:

• forge-skill -- The core skill authoring toolkit. Create, validate, test, and improve Hermes skills using evidence-driven design methodology.
• business-xray -- Map, diagnose, and optimize your business operations. Find the highest-leverage automation opportunities.

Installation

# Copy the skills to your Hermes skills directory
cp -r skills/* ~/.hermes/skills/

# Or symlink for easy updates
ln -s /path/to/hermes-forge/skills/forge-skill ~/.hermes/skills/forge-skill
ln -s /path/to/hermes-forge/skills/business-xray ~/.hermes/skills/business-xray

Quick Start

# Create a new skill
"create a skill for daily standup summaries"

# Build a multi-step automation system
"build a skill system for client onboarding"

# Validate an existing skill
"validate the email-drafter skill"

# Map your business operations
"run business x-ray on my workflow"

The Five Laws of Skill Design

These are measured, not vibes. Each law has eval evidence behind it.

1. Guide, don't prescribe -- Ship gotchas and frameworks, not comprehensive docs. A 50-line gotcha distillation matched a 575-line skill stack at 30% fewer tokens.
2. One home per rule -- Workflows are spine; rules live in their canonical skill. Inlined copies rot.
3. Enforce, don't instruct -- Mechanical rules become scripts with VERDICT evidence. A prose "zero tolerance" rule was violated in 8 of 9 measured runs.
4. Measure, don't assume -- Eval before and after any significant skill change. "Feels better" is how dead weight accumulates.
5. Real examples beat rule-prose -- Verbatim gold-standard samples carry behavior better than descriptions.

Architecture

skills/
├── forge-skill/              # The skill authoring toolkit
│   ├── SKILL.md              # Router + core instructions
│   ├── workflows/            # Create, validate, test, harden
│   ├── references/           # Design specs, mechanism selection
│   └── templates/            # Skill templates for common patterns
│
└── business-xray/            # Business process mapping
    ├── SKILL.md              # Router + interview framework
    ├── workflows/            # Progressive analysis workflows
    └── references/           # Archetypes, templates, frameworks

Platform Notes

Hermes Forge is built for Hermes Agent and uses:

• skill_manage for creating/editing skills
• delegate_task for isolated subagent execution (replaces Claude Code's context: fork)
• cronjob for scheduled/recurring automation (replaces Claude Code's /schedule)
• Standard file reads for loading workflow and reference content

License

MIT. The methodology is adapted from the AI Employee Builder by Rashid Khamis (the2hourclo), ported to Hermes Agent conventions.