Nous Research Adds /learn to Hermes Agent’s Skills System, Capturing Workflows as Slash Commands Without Hand-Writing SKILL.md

Nous Research has expanded the Skills System inside Hermes Agent, its open-source self-improving agent. The new addition is /learn , a command that writes a reusable skill for you . Point it at a document page, a local SDK, a past conversation, or pasted notes. The live agent gathers the material, then authors a SKILL.md on your behalf.

Hermes Agent can now /learn from anything: feed it directories of any source material (code, API docs, manuals, PDFs, configs) and it distills a verifiable reusable skill pic.twitter.com/oRznwCRF3E

Skills are on-demand knowledge documents the agent loads when needed. Each one is a folder containing a SKILL.md file with instructions. They follow a progressive disclosure pattern to keep token usage low. The format is compatible with the agentskills.io open standard.

All skills live in ~/.hermes/skills/ , the single source of truth. On a fresh install, bundled skills are copied from the repo. Hub-installed and agent-created skills land there too. Every installed skill becomes a slash command automatically. Running /plan or /axolotl loads that skill’s instructions into the turn.

Think of a skill as a reference document the agent reads only when relevant. Memory, by contrast, holds small durable facts that should always stay in context.

/learn removes the hand-writing step. You describe a source, and the agent does the sourcing with tools it already has. It reads local directories with read_file and search_files . It fetches online docs with web_extract . It can also capture a workflow you just walked it through.

The agent then authors a skill that follows the house authoring standards. That means a description under 60 characters, the standard section order, and Hermes-tool framing. It does not invent commands that do not exist.

There is no separate ingestion engine. /learn builds a standards-guided prompt and hands it to the agent as a normal turn. So it works the same in the CLI, the messaging gateway, the TUI, and the dashboard. It also works on any terminal backend, whether local, Docker, or remote. The dashboard adds a Learn a skill button with a directory field, a URL field, and a text box.

The agent saves the result with the skill_manage tool. If you have the write-approval gate on, that approval step still applies.

Skills load in three levels, so the agent pays only for what it uses.

The agent sees a compact index at all times. It loads full skill content only when a task needs it. This keeps a large skill library from flooding the context window.