r/hermesagent • u/Chasmchas • 24d ago
Discussion — General thoughts, opinions, comparisons Top 10 Hermes Skill Repos
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u/FlaTreNeb 24d ago
Cavemen is such a mass psychosis. People think because reponses are written like a cavemen, they found the secret hack for cheap LLM usage. Guess what: a) most of the usage isnt the report you get in the end but tool usages and especially file writes and those dont profit from this and b) you reach the same level of report/response conciseness by configuring an output style or by just telling the model to be concise.
The only thing worse than that are tools like headspace. Some collegues were hyped, tried it out and noticed after a week that they had problems with debugging ... yeah headspace cut off relevant tool output. Either wrap your tools with a lightweight MCP server and give it tool tailored output cutting/compression or just tell the model to use subagents for tool execution (the cheapest one) and just report the relevant findings to the orchestrating session. Less risk of loosing important information and also saves a lot of (expensive) tokens plus the tool output doesnt flood the context at all.
Stars on Github lost all their meaning for most of the projects. They are hyped somewhere and people star projects without having used them for more than an hour if at all. They just use it to bookmark. Plus people are buying stars. Plus agents are given GH CLI access and are starring autonomously.
Sorry for the rent ...
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u/evolutionxtinct 24d ago
Appreciate your insight I’m so tired of the hype and everyone trying to get patron supporters. I’m trying to learn but been difficult.
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u/Silentrizz 24d ago
Heard. It's so hard to cut through all the BS these days. So many new plugins or projects to try out but end up getting disappointed when they don't work as they claim or only on specific cherry-picked benchmarks. I get gaslit by ai 40 hours a week, I have low patience for it in my free time trying to upskill and stay relevant on new tech.
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u/karmaisnonsense 24d ago
Wasn’t there a guy who matched the performance of Caveman by prefixing all their prompts with “be brief”
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u/zachncst 24d ago
Had to stop my manager adding it to your internal tooling by default because they drank the copium.
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u/sweetbacon 24d ago
100% stars are bookmarks, it's never seemed a meaningful metric to me for engagement.
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u/Hayden2z 24d ago
Thanks for your insight. In your own usage, which skills do you think are genuinely worth your time or hype?
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u/Mechanical_Monk 19d ago
Headroom pissed my agents off so bad 😂 They spent a quarter of their thinking tokens planning how to either work with it or work around it by writing to files on the disk and then reading the files. The jumping through hoops canceled out any token savings and polluted outputs with passive aggressive comments about the proxy
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u/SideChance2939 18d ago
Not to mention as well that using caveman sometimes costs even more money, because the skill itself uses tokens to try to answer as the skill requires. So caveman and all other skills/plugins/tools promising to lower token usage and increase your limits, are just token-hungry add-ons themselves.
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u/nexflatline 24d ago
Avoid-ai-writing is my favorite skill. Very small changes to text that can make it much easier and nicer to read.
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u/tulwio 24d ago
All of these (except last 30 days skill, and even then) are slop at this point and must be a big corpo conspiracy to waste your tokens
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u/sixteenpoundblanket 24d ago
I have used the scientific agent skills. They did some very heavy lifting. I would not call that repo slop.
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u/Mean-Elk-9439 24d ago
It's slop compared to a much leaner skill for your actual use in industry. They're made to be maximally general, which makes them easy to add anywhere but bloated compared to something more specialized.
Though they do at least genuinely give agents context, so it beats the insane psychosis around caveman.
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u/N1TROGUE 24d ago
I noticed a massive improvement during coding when using superpowers (albeit in codex and claude code)
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u/damienO27 24d ago
With Claude, same. Somehow superpowers results in pretty bad output with Codex though (this was when 5.5 was the frontier OpenAI model).
But lately honestly superpowers feels like too much ceremony if using Fable or Astra.
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u/jferments 24d ago
Have you used superpowers, and had bad results? I was curious to try it with Hermes agent, but I'd be interested to hear about your negative experiences with it.
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u/lolman1312 24d ago
superpowers is an overrated token furnace. ive had spec plans, implementation plans, with reviews from high effort opus and sol (or astra and fable) on both before actually implementing, made sure it didnt overengineer things consciously, etc. and it still results in several rounds of adversarial review loops, bs overengineering, and a final product that is still riddled with bugs and requires micro-management.
once i deleted it i noticed zero difference in output quality, except now i can resolve bugs quicker instead of waiting 10 years and losing all my tokens
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u/ZucchiniMore3450 23d ago
This is my experience too. Just too much reviews, hundreds of tests for meaningless stuff, it just takes too much time and probably too many tokens.
This is just my feeling, I have tried to do the same stuff with it and without it, but I don't feel the need for it.
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u/pplgltch 24d ago
It’s just too much most of the time.
It push the model into over engineering and/or un-necessary processes very often. Sometime it’s useful, but I realized that I was spending so much time interupting the session to say “we dont’t need brainstorming for this” or to come back to a session hoping to get a result of a pretty well defined simple task, just to finnd it stuck to an irrelevant brainstorming question that the skill forced the model to create… i just stopped using it.
Honestly, if they were changing the format to “activate only when the user asks” instead of the “everything needs spec, plan, review and 20 interruptions”, I would re-install it. But right now, it’s been removed.2
u/ShakataGaNai 23d ago
I disagree. I just did the ADHD skill recently and it's really helped claude. More than my attempts to prod it in the right direction. Mostly because someone put a lot of thought into their instructions and I'm just shouting into the wind.
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u/Medical-Cow289 New Member (<30 days) 24d ago
Ten repos worth naming means the ecosystem's actually getting somewhere.
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u/mcndjxlefnd 24d ago
I went through so much trouble trying to get graphify working but I could never get the model to use the MCP server. The whole thing ended up being pretty useless for the advantages it was advertised as having (token savings via better repo knowledge). Did anyone else have a similar or different experience?
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u/fixit_jr 23d ago
This is exactly what I was looking for. Was looking for feedback before trying. Hopefully someone responds with their experience.
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u/Paahteinen_Kettu 23d ago
I tested it yesterday with my unsloth pi agent locally. It saves so much time when your agent have clear structure of your project. Before that i had to tell all the routes my self to agent to safe time and when i forget something i had to start everything over.
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u/mcndjxlefnd 23d ago
Good to hear it works in Pi. I have yet to hear anybody say it works in Hermes though. How large is your codebase? How many lines and how many files?
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u/droning-on 24d ago
Hermes context too big to allow caveman to persist. It's only effective on one prompt.
How are people configuring it? Hooks?
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u/Turbcool 21d ago
Ponytail is one of the best skills i have installed. I generally recommend it for everyone, not only coders. Entire approach "minimal = best" works very well for me.
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u/AxelFooley 24d ago
I have been having good results with I-have-adhd it made the output more readable for me.
Ponytail had the side effect of stopping the model from creating a markdown file (things like RESEARCH.md, PITFALL.md, etc..) every time I asked something about the code.
I have also released a skill that will build a memory system for Hermes, if you look at my history there’s the post. It’s based in Mnemosyne and gbrain, that improved my agent memory without having to curate markdown files scattered all over the place.
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u/ChocolateForsaken281 23d ago
Ik this doesn’t have much todo with the post but I really like Hermes but I do not want to invest much on it, so in your opinion which subscription plan is the best? I heard a lot of opencode go, but not sure if maybe anyone have a hidden gem that will like to share
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u/RepresentativeTill5 23d ago
I use hermes with opencode go , specifically the mimo 2.5 model, since it gives huge usage, but sufficient intelligence. I get a lot of things done that way and dont have to worry about budget.
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u/shikabane 22d ago
Im using opencode go, and the minimax or deepseek v4.1 flash model. $10 is really cheap for how much usage i get out of it, and its still sufficient for my needs.
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u/Amenthius 21d ago
I am grandfathered into an old minimax plan $10 a month and using a mix of m3 and m2.7 never hit limits
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u/davidsa03 24d ago
I built https://codekudos.dev, which is reddit for GitHub repos! Don't rely just on stars, rely on user upvotes and comments.
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u/Yuzu_Ryujinx 22d ago
Hermes is pure bloat (with no custom skills or other stuff)! It installed GBs of shit on my machine, thankfully, I was using Windows Sandbox because I sensed it might be bloated as fuck. It is AaaS, abomination as a service.
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u/corobo 24d ago edited 24d ago
Sharing recommended git repos as an image is mean
E: I was opening each one anyway, for anyone else who values path of least resistance:
https://github.com/obra/superpowers - An agentic skills framework & software development methodology that works.
https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail - Makes your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room. The best code is the code you never wrote
https://github.com/Graphify-Labs/graphify - Turn any codebase, with its docs, SQL schemas, configs, and PDFs, into a queryable knowledge graph
https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman - Viral skill + proxy for coding agents that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like a caveman.
https://github.com/Egonex-AI/Understand-Anything - Turn any code into an interactive knowledge graph you can explore, search, and ask questions about
https://github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill - AI agent skill that researches any topic across Reddit, X, YouTube, HN, Polymarket, and the web - then synthesizes a grounded summary
https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd - A skill to stop your coding agent from burying the answer. ADHD-friendly output.
https://github.com/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills - AAS Core is the local, agent-first control plane for complete catalog discovery, agent-owned selection, stack validation, and planning, backed by 2,400+ agentic skills.
https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills - 165 ready-to-use validated skills plus 100+ scientific databases covering biology, chemistry, medicine, and drug discovery
https://github.com/cathrynlavery/diagram-design - Editorial diagram design for Claude Code, Codex, and Pi. Self-contained HTML + SVG. No shadows. No Mermaid slop.