Free Hermes Agent recipes

Ready-to-use prompts, SKILL.md and SOUL.md files and scheduled jobs for your own Hermes, organized by what you want it to do. Written for v0.21.x.

Setup and First Week

• Pick the Right Model for Hermes Agent
  A message that has Hermes compare current models against your real workload and recommend one main model plus a cheaper one for routine work.
• Your First Conversation: Teach Hermes Who You Are
  A message that has Hermes interview you and save a compact profile to USER.md, with your approval before anything is stored.
• Measure Your Token Baseline Before It Costs You
  A message that has Hermes measure the fixed token overhead of your setup, show what drives it and save a dated baseline, without changing anything.
• The First-Week Checklist
  A message that has Hermes build a seven-day setup plan around your goals, save it as a checklist and walk you through one day at a time.

SOUL.md and Personality

• Write Your SOUL.md From Scratch
  A file that sets Hermes's voice, answer style, honesty rules and when to ask before acting: a SOUL.md template ready to fill in and save.
• A SOUL.md for a Writing Partner
  A file that turns Hermes into a writing partner through SOUL.md: it drafts in your voice, edits with reasons and never invents facts or sources.
• A SOUL.md for a Coding Assistant
  A file that makes Hermes a careful coding assistant through SOUL.md: read first, small changes, run the tests, and never commit or delete without asking.

Memory That Stays Useful

• Clean Up a Cluttered Hermes MEMORY.md
  A message that has Hermes audit its own MEMORY.md, merge duplicates, drop stale entries and move procedures out, then apply the plan only after your yes.
• Turn On Memory Write Approval in Hermes
  A file snippet for config.yaml that makes Hermes ask before it saves anything to memory, plus the commands to review what it has staged.
• Memory, Skills or SOUL.md: Where Things Go
  A message that sorts everything you want Hermes to know into the right home: USER.md, MEMORY.md, SOUL.md, AGENTS.md, a skill, a cron job, config.yaml or nowhere.

Writing Your Own Skills

• Turn a Repeated Task Into a Hermes Skill
  A message that has Hermes interview you about a task you keep repeating and write a complete SKILL.md for it, saved only after your yes.
• The Hermes SKILL.md Template With Frontmatter
  A skill that gives you a complete SKILL.md template with valid frontmatter and the When to Use, Procedure, Output, Pitfalls and Verification sections, ready to fill in for any task.
• Write a Skill Description That Triggers Reliably
  A message that diagnoses why a skill loads at the wrong times, writes and tests three new descriptions, and patches the best one after your yes.
• Audit a Hermes Skill Before You Install It
  A message that has Hermes inspect a third-party skill without installing it, read every file and script, flag risky commands and hidden instructions, and give a clear verdict.

Scheduled Jobs

• The Daily Morning Brief
  A schedule that sends one short, phone-friendly brief every weekday morning: today's events, your top tasks, the weather and a few headlines.
• A Weekly Review Every Friday
  A schedule that looks back over your week every Friday afternoon and sends what got done, what is still open, a goals check and three priorities for next week.
• Write Cron Prompts That Work in a Fresh Session
  A message that turns a rough idea for a scheduled job into a self-contained Hermes cron prompt plus the exact command to create it.

Messaging and Gateways

• Set Up Telegram With Hermes Safely
  A message that checks, from a terminal session, that your new Telegram gateway is locked to your account and running, after a setup in which your bot token never enters a chat.
• Lock the Gateway to Your Own Account
  A file snippet for ~/.hermes/.env that keeps the Hermes gateway on deny by default and lets in only your own accounts, with the steps to test it.
• Use the Email Gateway for Forwarded Messages
  A skill that handles email you forward to the Hermes email gateway: you get back a summary, the dates and asks, and a draft reply you send yourself.

Research and Writing

• A Research Brief With Sources
  A message that has Hermes research a question on the web and return a short brief where every claim has a source, a date and a confidence label.
• Compare Options Before You Decide
  A message that has Hermes research two to five options against your own criteria and return a sourced comparison table with a clear recommendation.
• Draft a Newsletter From Your Notes
  A message that turns your rough notes into a full newsletter issue in your voice, with subject lines, and marks every fact you still need to check.

Personal Productivity

• Inbox Triage Without Sending Anything
  A message that sorts your email into clear groups with one line per message, in read-only mode: Hermes never sends, deletes, archives or replies.
• Plan Tomorrow From Your Calendar and Tasks
  A message that turns tomorrow's calendar and your task list into a realistic time-blocked plan with a top three, without touching either one.
• Turn a Brain Dump Into a Plan
  A message that sorts a messy brain dump into tasks, decisions, waiting items, worries and ideas, then picks three next actions that fit your week.

Tools, MCP and Automation

• Connect an MCP Server to Hermes Agent
  A file snippet for config.yaml that connects your first MCP server to Hermes Agent: a local file server that can see one folder and cannot write, plus the commands to test it.
• Limit Which Tools an MCP Server Exposes in Hermes
  A file snippet for config.yaml that allowlists only the MCP tools you need with tools.include, so Hermes sees fewer tools, spends fewer tokens and cannot reach the risky ones.
• A Code Review Skill for Hermes Agent
  A skill that reviews uncommitted changes or a branch diff in a git repository and reports bugs, risks and missing tests by severity, without editing a single file.

Safety, Costs and Troubleshooting

• Lock Down Hermes Agent Approvals and the Command Allowlist
  A file snippet for config.yaml that sets approvals you can live with: manual prompts, scheduled jobs that can never run flagged commands, a deny list and a short, audited command allowlist.
• Harden a Hermes Agent VPS: A Security Checklist
  A message that has Hermes audit the VPS it runs on against a hardening checklist, read-only, and hand you a table of exact fixes to run yourself.
• Cut Your Hermes Agent Token Costs
  A message that reads your real prompt-size and usage numbers and returns a ranked plan to cut Hermes token costs, without changing anything until you agree.