Hermes Skills Hub: 2026 Guide to 90,000+ Agent Skills

Do not index

The Hermes Skills Hub is the built-in system for finding and installing skills in Hermes Agent, the open-source personal agent from Nous Research. As of August 26, 2026 the hub indexes 90,700 skills across 11 registries, and you can browse, search, and install any of them from the hermes skills CLI or straight from chat with /skills. We host Hermes agents for a living at Agent37, so we work inside this ecosystem every day. This guide covers what the hub actually contains right now, how installs and security scanning really work, and the parts every other write-up glosses over.

What the Skills Hub actually is

A Hermes skill is not a plugin and not a binary. The official docs define skills as "on-demand knowledge documents the agent can load when needed." Each one is a folder holding a SKILL.md file, plus optional scripts, references, and assets. The format follows the agentskills.io open standard, originally created by Anthropic and now shared by Claude Code, OpenClaw, Cursor, and dozens of other agent products.

The Skills Hub is the layer that ties registries of those folders together. The docs describe it as one place to "browse, search, install, and manage skills from online registries, skills.sh, direct well-known skill endpoints, and official optional skills."

One naming trap to clear up early: the Hermes README has a "Skills Hub" community link that points to agentskills.io, the standard's own site. The hub you actually install from lives in the product itself: the catalog page in the official docs, the hermes skills CLI, and the /skills command in chat. This guide is about that second, real one.

Two things happen the moment a skill lands in ~/.hermes/skills/, the directory that is the single source of truth. It joins the agent's skill index, a compact list that costs about 3,000 tokens at session start, with full content loaded only on demand. And it becomes a slash command, so /gif-search funny cats works in the CLI and in any connected chat platform. You can even stack up to five: /github-pr-workflow /test-driven-development fix issue #123 and open a PR loads both skills in order.

What's inside the Hermes Skills Hub in 2026

Most articles still quote "652 skills across 4 registries." That number is close to a year out of date, and it is still all over page one: one current top-five guide runs the 652 figure today, and another counts 19,932 from a June snapshot. Here is what the live catalog showed on August 26, 2026:

Slice	Count
Built-in skills	82
Official optional skills	117
Community skills	90,501
Registries	11
Categories	199
Total skills	90,700

The eleven registries, largest first: ClawHub (69,150), skills.sh (19,967), LobeHub (505), browse.sh (440), NVIDIA (299), official optional (117), built-in (82), gstack (53), OpenAI (44), HuggingFace (25), and Anthropic (17). The catalog is built to rebuild itself twice a day (06:00 and 18:00 UTC), but the community index behind it has been stuck since July 20, 2026 and Nous's own freshness watchdog has an open issue about it, so the big registry numbers have not moved in over a month. Counts will drift again once the rebuild is unstuck, but the shape holds: two giant community sources (ClawHub is OpenClaw's marketplace, skills.sh is Vercel's directory), a tail of curated vendor registries, and a small core that Nous Research ships itself.

That core deserves attention. The 82 built-in skills arrive with every Hermes install and cover daily-driver territory: productivity, creative work, GitHub, research, email. The 117 optional skills ship in the repo but stay dormant until you run hermes skills install official/<category>/<skill>. The heavier tooling lives there (MLOps alone has 31 entries), including openclaw-migration, which imports an existing OpenClaw setup into Hermes, memories and skills included.

How installing actually works

From the terminal:

hermes skills search kubernetes
hermes skills inspect openai/skills/k8s
hermes skills install openai/skills/k8s
hermes skills install official/security/1password
hermes skills install https://example.com/SKILL.md --name my-skill
hermes skills update
hermes skills uninstall k8s

Every command has a chat equivalent (/skills search, /skills install, and so on), which matters more than it sounds. You can install a skill from your phone, mid-conversation in Telegram or WhatsApp, and the agent picks it up in its next session. Use /reset when you want it active immediately.

Under the hood, an install is not a blind download. The bundle is quarantined, hashed, and run through a security scanner that checks for data exfiltration, prompt injection, destructive commands, and supply-chain signals. The verdict, source URL, and content hash land in a lock file, with an append-only audit log beside it, and hermes skills audit re-scans everything you have installed whenever you ask.

Every source also carries a trust level: builtin, official, trusted (the OpenAI, Anthropic, HuggingFace, and NVIDIA skills repos), or community, which covers everything else, including all of ClawHub. A --force flag can override caution-level findings. It cannot override a dangerous verdict. That hard stop exists for good reason.

Skills that talk to outside services declare their keys in frontmatter: required_environment_variables reads secrets from ~/.hermes/.env, and required_credential_files handles OAuth and service-account files. Keys stay on your machine, never inside the skill folder, and hermes skills inspect shows what a skill will ask for before you commit.

The security paragraph you should actually read

Koi Security's February 2026 audit examined all 2,857 skills then on ClawHub and found 341 outright malicious; a mid-February update raised that count to 824 as the registry passed 10,700 skills. Those figures describe OpenClaw's marketplace, not the Hermes catalog, but ClawHub is the Skills Hub's single largest source, so the practical rules are the same. Prefer built-in, official, and trusted sources for anything that touches credentials, email, or money. Run hermes skills inspect before you install; a skill is a markdown file, and you can just read it. Read any bundled scripts folder with the same eyes: helper scripts are code the agent may run, not documentation. And leave --force alone unless you have read the finding it is overriding.

Hermes writes its own skills too

The hub is only half the story. Hermes's signature feature is a learning loop: it creates skills from its own experience through the skill_manage tool, which the docs call the agent's procedural memory, and it improves those skills during use. Since v0.18.0 there is also /learn: point it at a URL, a directory, or the workflow you just walked it through, and it distills a reusable skill on the spot.

Two controls keep this sane. A write-approval gate (skills.write_approval) stages every agent-authored change under ~/.hermes/pending/skills/ for human review with /skills approve; it ships disabled, so turn it on if a self-editing agent makes you nervous. And the bundled-skill sync never stomps your work: edit any shipped skill and updates skip it from then on, with hermes skills reset <name> --restore as the undo. A built-in Curator watches usage on top of that, surfacing unmanaged skills and flagging ones you never invoke.

Writing your own Hermes agent skills

You do not have to wait for the agent to learn. A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file: YAML frontmatter over a markdown body of instructions. Drop it in ~/.hermes/skills/ and it is live at the next session. The rule that trips everyone: the agent decides whether to load a skill by matching your request against the frontmatter description field, not the body. Write the description as a trigger condition ("Use when the user asks about invoices or billing exports"), or your perfectly good skill never fires.

Test it without ceremony: hermes chat --toolsets skills -q "your trigger phrase" shows whether the skill loads. When it holds up, publish it with hermes skills publish (the FAQ below has the exact command) or share it with your team as a tap.

The directories worth bookmarking

Three community projects earn a spot next to the official hub:

awesome-hermes-agent (by 0xNyk): the most-starred independent directory, about 250 entries with production/beta/experimental maturity tags, 5,400+ stars, updated a few times a month. Plainly states it is not an official Nous Research project.

awesome-hermes-skills (by ZeroPointRepo): the longer list at 350+ entries, but about 200 of those just catalog the built-in and optional skills that already ship with Hermes. The roughly 170 community projects are the part tagged by maturity, each linking out to per-project install instructions. Updated almost daily. Run by the TranscriptAPI team, with the affiliation disclosed.

Hermes Atlas (hermesatlas.com): 240 ecosystem repos ranked by live GitHub star counts. The number one skill pack, obra/superpowers, sits at 277,000+ stars.

One to skip: the GitHub repo describing itself as "HermesHub, the Skills Hub for Hermes Agent by Nous Research" is neither by Nous Research nor, anymore, a skills hub. It pivoted to an agent-registry experiment and has not shipped a commit since June 2026.

Teams get something better than a directory: taps. Point hermes skills tap add <owner/repo> at any GitHub repo full of SKILL.md folders and it becomes a private registry. No server, no sign-up, no release pipeline. Set a GITHUB_TOKEN in your environment or the hub runs into GitHub's 60-requests-per-hour anonymous ceiling; with a token it is 5,000.

Do Claude Code and OpenClaw skills work in Hermes?

Mostly, yes. The SKILL.md core (name, description, markdown body, bundled files) is portable by design across everything that speaks the agentskills.io standard, which is why ClawHub and skills.sh can sit inside the Hermes hub at all. What does not carry over is each host's private extension namespace: Claude Code's execution-control frontmatter, OpenClaw's metadata.openclaw dependency gating, Hermes's own metadata.hermes.* toolset wiring. Agents ignore foreign metadata instead of erroring on it, so a Claude Code skill generally just works, minus the Claude-specific behavior. For a full switch, the optional openclaw-migration skill and hermes claw migrate bring an OpenClaw setup across wholesale, and imported user skills land in ~/.hermes/skills/openclaw-imports/. Already keep a folder of Claude Code skills? Point skills.external_dirs at it (say, ~/.claude/skills) and Hermes indexes those skills in place, no reinstall needed.

Where skills sit in the broader agent stack, next to gateways, memory layers, and orchestrators, is its own topic; our Paperclip vs Hermes vs OpenClaw breakdown maps it, and our Hermes vs OpenClaw comparison walks through the OpenClaw-to-Hermes switch step by step.

Skills vs MCP servers

The other recurring confusion. An MCP server is a live connection that gives the agent new tools: a database it can query, a browser it can drive. A skill is knowledge about how and when to use the tools it already has. They compose rather than compete: wire up an MCP server in config.yaml, let Hermes work out a reliable call sequence, then run /learn and it distills that sequence into a skill it can repeat. Our MCP vs Claude Skills guide maps the distinction across the wider agent ecosystem.

Skills only pay off on an always-on agent

Here is the operational truth the listicles skip: a skill library is only as useful as the agent attached to it. Chat-side installs, scheduled skills, a Curator that learns from usage, an agent that improves its own skills over weeks: all of it assumes a Hermes gateway that is running when the message arrives. On a laptop, that loop dies at lid close.

Since this summer there is also a first-party option: Nous runs a hosted Hermes preview from $0.56 per day for its Medium size, about $17 a month if the agent stays up, before model costs. It covers the chat loop, but you get no terminal and no file browser, so the hermes skills CLI workflows in this guide need a machine you control.

Hermes itself is free, MIT-licensed software, and every skill in the hub is a free markdown file. What you pay for is model API usage and somewhere always-on to run the agent. A $5 VPS works if you want to own Docker, updates, and 2 a.m. restarts yourself; our cheap Hermes hosting guide prices out every route honestly. If you would rather skip the maintenance, Agent37 runs your Hermes agent always-on from $3.99/mo, deploys in one click, and gives you a full web terminal for exactly the hermes skills commands in this guide. Building a product on agents instead? The Agent37 Cloud API provisions persistent Hermes instances from $1.99/mo behind a single API call. One honest caveat either way: at these prices support is an AI bot first, not a human help desk.

Hermes Skills Hub FAQ

Is the Hermes Skills Hub free?

Yes. The hub is part of open-source Hermes, and every skill in it installs free. Your only costs are model tokens and wherever the agent runs.

How many skills are in the Hermes Skills Hub?

90,700 as of August 26, 2026: 82 built-in, 117 official optional, and 90,501 community skills across 11 registries. The catalog is set to rebuild twice daily, though the community index has been frozen since July 20, 2026, so treat any exact figure, including this one, as a snapshot.

Can the agent install hub skills by itself?

No. Hub installs are user-driven through the CLI or /skills commands. The agent writes and edits its own skills through skill_manage, but it does not shop the hub autonomously.

How do I publish my own skill?

Push it to a GitHub repo with hermes skills publish skills/my-skill --to github --repo owner/repo, then anyone can add that repo as a tap. Getting into the trusted tier requires a Hermes core pull request; community trust is the default for everything else.

Why isn't my installed skill firing?

Nine times out of ten the frontmatter description is the problem. The agent matches your request against each skill's description field, not its body, so a vague description never triggers. Rewrite it as a condition ("Use when..."), then restart the session or run /reset so the refreshed index picks it up.

Hermes Skills Hub: The Complete 2026 Guide to 90,000+ Skills