Curator Maintenance for Agent-Created Skills

The Hermes curator keeps skill catalogs from accumulating unused, overlapping material. It tracks usage, moves eligible skills through active, stale, and archived states, and can optionally run an auxiliary-model consolidation review.

Official documentation: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/curator

Safe operating model

Curator checks run during quiet periods rather than as a separate cron daemon. The deterministic inactivity pass is the default. LLM-driven consolidation is opt-in because it costs model tokens and can make broader structural changes.

Real runs create recoverable snapshots and reports. Archival is not deletion: archived skills can be restored. Hub-installed skills are outside curator mutation, while bundled-skill pruning follows its own setting. Pinning protects an eligible skill from automatic transitions and tool-driven deletion.

Maintenance checklist

Review hermes curator status before changing policy.
Run hermes curator run --dry-run before the first real pass.
Pin critical eligible skills.
Keep automatic backup enabled for mutating runs.
Leave consolidation off unless overlap justifies it.
Route curator review to an appropriate auxiliary model.
Read the per-run report and rename map.
Test rollback and restore on noncritical material.

Pitfalls

Assuming every skill is in the curator's jurisdiction.
Enabling consolidation merely to reduce the number of skills.
Treating archive as permanent deletion.
Disabling backups and discovering an unwanted merge later.
Interpreting a no-candidate, zero-duration review as model failure.

Verification steps

Run curator status and record active, stale, archived, pinned, and managed counts.
Preview the next pass with dry-run mode.
Inspect the candidates and pin any load-bearing eligible skill.
Create or confirm a curator backup.
Run a prune-only pass.
Read its machine-readable and human-readable reports.
Restore one disposable archived skill or test rollback in a safe profile.
Re-run status and verify the intended state.