Skills Tutorial

Touring the 9 new skills that landed with Hermes Agent v0.14.0

Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent

@hermesagents

May 17, 2026

9 min read

Hermes Agent's skill system is a curated layer on top of the agentskills.io open standard. Skills are reusable, composable agent capabilities — you install one and the agent gains a new ability without you writing any code.

v0.14.0 added nine new optional skills that you can install via hermes skills. It also made huggingface/skills a trusted default tap (#26219), which means community skills published on Hugging Face install with no extra configuration.

This post is a tour: what each new skill does, when it's worth installing, and where to find each in the upstream repo.

How to install any of these

bash
hermes
> /skills

Browse the list, pick one, install. Alternatively:

bash
hermes skills install <skill-name>

Skills are namespaced. The v0.14.0 additions live under the appropriate category in the hub.

---

1. Hyperliquid — perpetuals and spot trading

PR: #23583 (salvage of #1952)

The Hyperliquid skill wraps the Hyperliquid SDK plus the REST API for perpetual and spot trading on the Hyperliquid DEX. The agent can:

  • Quote prices on perp and spot markets
  • Place market or limit orders
  • Read your positions and PnL
  • Monitor a watchlist

When to install: if you trade on Hyperliquid and want the agent to handle order placement or monitoring from chat. Skip if: you don't trade or you only want read-only market data (use Yahoo Finance below).

Warning: this skill can place real orders with real money. Wire it up only on agents you trust completely, and consider scoping the API key to read-only first.

2. Yahoo Finance — market data

PR: #23590

Live equity quotes, options chains, fundamentals (P/E, market cap, etc.), and historical price series. No API key needed — Yahoo Finance has a public endpoint the skill wraps.

When to install: anyone who wants the agent to answer "what did NVDA close at" or "graph the 1-year of AAPL." Skip if: you need real-time intraday data with sub-second freshness — Yahoo Finance has a delay.

Pairs well with cron — schedule a daily market summary, deliver to your messaging gateway.

3. api-testing — REST and GraphQL debug recipes

PR: #23582 (salvages #1800)

A set of debug recipes for hitting REST endpoints and GraphQL servers from the agent. Handles auth (bearer / basic / OAuth), pagination, multipart, structured response parsing. Includes a "diagnose why this 400 happened" mode that walks through common API debugging patterns.

When to install: developers who use Hermes for backend work and want the agent to be competent at API calls. Skip if: you only use Hermes for code-write tasks, not runtime debugging.

4. Unified EVM multi-chain

PR: #25299 (salvages #25291 + #2010, folds in base/)

One skill that covers Ethereum mainnet plus the major L2s (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, others) under a unified interface. Read balances, simulate transactions, query contract state across chains without juggling per-chain skills.

When to install: if you do anything on EVM chains and the agent should be aware of the cross-chain picture. Skip if: you only use a single chain — install just that chain's skill instead.

5. darwinian-evolver — evolutionary prompt/skill tuning

PR: #26760

This is the most experimental of the nine. The skill runs an evolutionary algorithm over prompts or skill definitions: mutate variants, score them against a fitness function you provide, select the best, repeat. It's a way to find better prompts than you'd write by hand for a specific task.

When to install: power users who want to tune skills or prompts and have a clear fitness function (a test set, a benchmark, a numeric goal). Skip if: you're using Hermes for general chat — evolver shines on narrow, gradable tasks.

6. osint-investigation — OSINT recipes

PR: #26729 (closes #355)

Open-source intelligence recipes for investigating people, domains, and organizations. Looks up DNS history, WHOIS, certificate transparency logs, social media presence, leaked-email databases (Have I Been Pwned). The agent runs the right query for the question you asked.

When to install: security researchers, journalists, sales/recruiting roles, anyone who legitimately needs to compose multiple OSINT sources fast. Skip if: you don't have a legitimate use case — this skill is a stalker multiplier in the wrong hands.

7. pinggy-tunnel — expose local services to the public internet

PR: #26765

Wraps Pinggy to expose a local service on a public URL — useful for testing webhooks, demoing a local app, or letting an agent on a remote machine reach a service running on your laptop.

When to install: anyone building webhook-driven integrations or who needs short-lived public tunnels. Skip if: you already use ngrok / Cloudflare tunnels — pinggy is one option among several.

8. watchers — RSS / HTTP JSON / GitHub polling

PR: #21881

Cron-native polling for things that don't have webhooks. Configure a watcher with a URL (RSS feed, HTTP JSON endpoint, or GitHub repo/branch), a polling interval, and a notification condition. When the condition fires, the watcher delivers a message through whichever platform you configured.

This skill is in the no-agent cron mode — it doesn't invoke a full agent turn per check, just a lightweight polling worker. Important for things you want to check every 60 seconds without paying for an LLM call each time.

When to install: anyone who wants "tell me when X changes" automation. Skip if: every source you care about has a webhook — use that instead.

9. Notion overhaul — Developer Platform refresh

PR: #26612

The Notion skill was rebuilt against the May 2026 Notion Developer Platform refresh, which broke older clients. The new skill handles Notion's data API, blocks, databases, comments — all of it — through the new endpoints.

When to install: if Notion is your team's knowledge base or task tracker, this restores agent integration to current. Skip if: you don't use Notion.

---

The huggingface/skills tap (#26219)

Hugging Face has a community-published skills directory at huggingface.co/skills. v0.14.0 made this a trusted default tap in the Hermes Skills Hub — meaning skills published there install via hermes skills with no extra source-list configuration.

Practical effect: when somebody publishes a useful skill on Hugging Face, it shows up in your hermes skills browse without any plumbing on your end.

Trust caveat: "trusted tap" means "in the default search list," not "every skill there is audited." See the security model post — read the skill before installing it.

How to find what you need

The Skills Hub UI has been getting better with each release. v0.14.0 added richer info panels (#22905) and per-skill pages in the left sidebar (#26646), so browsing the catalog is less of a wall-of-names.

For programmatic access, hermes skills list works from the CLI; pipe it into grep to find what you're looking for.

Where the ecosystem is going

The pattern across these nine: agent capabilities that used to need custom code now ship as one-line installs. Yahoo Finance, OSINT, multi-chain, Hyperliquid — all of these would've been "write a Python wrapper around the API" five years ago. With agentskills.io as the standard and the huggingface/skills tap as a distribution channel, the curve is bending toward "install, don't build."

If you wrote skills for OpenClaw, the migration guide covers how to bring them over. If you want to publish a new skill, the agentskills.io standard is the place to start — the same skill will work in Hermes and any other agent that adopts the standard.

Read more

Stay in the Loop

Community updates on Hermes Agent releases, new skills, and integrations. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.