Hermes Agent Skill Retirement Workflow: Once activated, the skill will remain active for 30 days of inactivity, then be downgraded, and finally archived after 90 days.
According to Perceiving One monitoring, the open-source AI agent framework Hermes Agent by Nous Research has added the Curator feature, completing the last piece of skill lifecycle management. Previously, one of the core selling points of the Hermes Agent was that the agent could automatically create skill documents after completing complex tasks, accumulating experience for future reuse, but skills could only be added and not removed. Some users provided feedback that after accumulating 146 self-built skills for agents, the skill list in each round of conversation's system prompts took up around 4400 tokens, with more and more useless skills piling up and no elimination mechanism in place.
The Curator process consists of two steps. The first step is a deterministic state machine that does not invoke the model: each self-built skill for an agent has counters for usage times, last invocation time, etc. Skills that have not been used for 30 days are marked as stale, and those unused for 90 days are moved to an archive directory where they can be restored at any time. The second step involves model review, where every 7 days, when the agent is idle, an auxiliary model is dispatched to scan the remaining skills, merging those with overlapping functions and fixing outdated content, with a maximum of 8 iterations. The review runs in a separate prompt cache without affecting the ongoing user dialogues.
The Curator only deals with agent self-built skills and does not touch built-in skills or those installed from the skill market. It does not perform automatic deletion, with archiving being the worst-case outcome. Users can use the "pin" command to lock essential skills, and locked skills cannot be modified by the agent's own skill management tool. The Curator is enabled by default but can be disabled. The pull request consists of approximately 2200 lines of code, with all 56 tests passing successfully. It was merged into the main branch on April 29 and has not yet been released with the official version.
