Curator — Auto-Clean Your Skills

Your desk started neat, but six months later you’re digging through a drawer full of nearly identical sticky notes. That’s what happens to an AI agent’s skill library without a janitor.

The Problem: Skill Hoarding

Every time your Hermes agent solves a novel problem, it saves a skill to ~/.hermes/skills/. That’s brilliant — until you have 47 variations of “send a polite follow-up email.” They pollute the catalog, waste tokens on every search, and make the agent slower to pick the right tool.

Meet the Curator

The curator is a background maintenance pass that tracks how often each skill is viewed, used, and patched. It moves long-unused skills through three states:

active → stale → archived

• Stale after 30 days of no use
• Archived after 90 days — moved to ~/.hermes/skills/.archive/

The best part? It never auto-deletes. The worst outcome is archival, which is fully recoverable. Think of it as a storage unit, not a shredder.

When Does It Run?

No cron daemon. The curator triggers on an inactivity check:

1. At least 7 days since the last run (interval_hours)
2. At least 2 hours of agent idle time (min_idle_hours)

When both are true, it spawns a background fork of AIAgent — completely separate from your active conversation. Your chat never gets interrupted.

First-Run Grace Period

On a brand-new install, the curator does not run immediately. It seeds last_run_at to “now” and defers the first real pass by one full interval. That gives you a week to review your skill library, pin anything important, or opt out.

Want to preview before it mutates anything?

hermes curator run --dry-run

That produces the same review report without touching your library.

Two Phases, One Cheap

A run has two phases:

1. Automatic transitions — deterministic, no LLM cost. This is the always-on pruning that just moves files around based on age.
2. Aux-model review — a short AI review that proposes consolidations or patches drift (skills that have changed behavior).

Phase 1 runs for free. Phase 2 is optional and small.

What’s Off-Limits?

Two things are never touched by auto-transitions:

• Pinned skills — you explicitly marked them important
• Skills referenced by any cron job — even paused/disabled ones

By default, the curator can also archive unused bundled built-in skills after 90 days. But hub-installed skills from agentskills.io are always safe. To restore old behavior where bundled skills are never touched:

# in your config
curator:
  prune_builtins: false

Summary & Practical Tip

The curator is your skill library’s janitor — it keeps the catalog clean, prevents token waste, and never permanently destroys anything. It’s the difference between a cluttered drawer and a well-organized toolbox.

Practical tip: Before your first curator run, spend 10 minutes reviewing your skills. Pin the 3–5 you use most, and delete any you know are garbage. Then let the curator handle the rest. Check the archive folder monthly — anything you miss there was probably never worth keeping.