Hermes Agent's skills aren't about having more to get stronger. Essentially, skills provide the Agent with operational experience and process instructions. If there are too many, too general, or conflicting suggestions, it may read a bunch of irrelevant suggestions before the task starts, resulting in slower actions, more complicated steps, or even misapplying the process.
What skills are worth keeping?
Keep those that can significantly change execution quality: for example, the release process of a framework, internal company code specifications, fixed test commands, or specific document formats. Skills that only write generalized requirements like "You need to analyze carefully" or "Please output clearly" have very low value and actually occupy the context.
A good skill should answer three questions: when to trigger, how exactly to do it, and in which situations it should not be used. Skills lacking "inappropriate scenarios" are the easiest to trigger by mistake.
How to tell if you've loaded too much?
If Hermes Agent often starts with long plans in small tasks, or mixes frontend, deployment, documentation, and testing processes together, you should suspect skill overload. Another signal is: you are asking a simple question, but it is citing a completely unrelated process.
The solution is not to delete everything, but to create small collections by project or task. Only enable project-related skills when coding; Enable document skills while writing documents; Switch separately when making videos, spreadsheets, or presentations.
Advice for the team
When sharing skills, team members should manage versions and review them; don't just send them to public directories just because everyone finds them useful. Each skill should ideally have a maintainer, applicable project, and last update date. Rules that can be clearly explained in the README don't necessarily have to be skills; Only experience that repeatedly affects the Agent's actions is worth accumulating.
