Day 5: Turn Repeat Work Into a Skill

A Skill is not a fancy prompt

Many articles describe Hermes Skills as self-improving abilities that grow from experience. That is useful, but beginners need a simpler product idea first: a Skill productizes a repeated workflow.

If you ask Hermes to do the same class of task every week, such as preparing a weekly report, reviewing a PR, processing feedback, or drafting a public article, you should not rewrite the prompt each time. Capture the process, inputs, outputs, constraints, and acceptance criteria.

What deserves to become a Skill

Ask three questions:

1. Does this task repeat?
2. Do inputs look similar each time?
3. Does the output have a stable acceptance standard?

If all three are yes, consider a Skill.

The Day 4 meeting-notes workflow is a good candidate. The input is meeting notes. The output is a JSON or Markdown task list. Acceptance criteria are clear.

Do not make a Skill for:

1. one-off exploration;
2. goals the user has not clarified;
3. high-risk actions that depend heavily on judgment;
4. anything created only to look advanced.

What a Skill file should contain

A good Skill can be simple, but it must be concrete:

# meeting-action-extractor

When to use:
Use this when the user provides meeting notes and wants tasks, owners, deadlines, and review flags.

Inputs:
- Markdown, transcript, or plain text meeting notes.

Output:
- A task list with owner, deadline, source quote, confidence, and needs_review.

Rules:
- Do not invent missing owners.
- Keep source_quote short.
- Mark uncertain fields as unknown.
- Ask before sending tasks to external tools.

This is not creative writing. It is an SOP Hermes can reuse instead of guessing.

MCP is a boundary, not a magic socket

MCP matters because it gives models a consistent way to call external tools. A useful three-layer mental model is:

1. Perception: read files, messages, web pages, RSS, and issues.
2. Decision: classify the task and choose a Skill or tool.
3. Action: write files, call APIs, send messages, or generate reports.

The more tools you add, the more important the boundary becomes. Start read-only: search, repository inspection, web fetch, calendar read, issue read. Write actions come later and require approval.

Build one minimal Skill today

Turn Day 4’s data workflow into a Skill:

1. Create a Skill folder.
2. Write SKILL.md.
3. Define when it should trigger.
4. Define inputs and outputs.
5. List forbidden behavior.
6. Test with three samples.
7. Record failure cases.

Do not start with automatic Skill generation. Hand-write one first so you learn what a good Skill looks like.

Common mistakes

1. Writing a Skill as a vague inspirational prompt.
2. Installing many community Skills without a workflow that needs them.
3. Granting write permissions for a read-only task.
4. Letting the model guess after a tool call fails.

Ship this artifact

Create hermes-day-5-skill.md:

skill_name: "meeting-action-extractor"
trigger: "meeting notes -> action items"
inputs:
  - notes.md
outputs:
  - output/tasks.json
permissions:
  - read raw files
  - write output folder
approval_required:
  - send tasks to chat
  - create external tickets
test_cases: 3

Tomorrow is automation. Only a workflow that has produced stable results manually deserves a schedule.

Next step

1. Day 6: Give stable workflows a schedule - move from manual trigger to timed execution.
2. Top 10 Hermes Skills - choose the first low-risk skills.

Beginner Walkthrough: Turn Day 4 Into A Skill

A Skill is an operating manual for Hermes. Today you create one minimal Skill: extract action items from meeting notes.

Step 1: Inspect existing Skills

hermes skills list || true
hermes skills search meeting || true

If these commands are unavailable, you can still write a SKILL.md manually.

Step 2: Create a draft folder

mkdir -p hermes-day5-skills/meeting-action-extractor
touch hermes-day5-skills/meeting-action-extractor/SKILL.md

Step 3: Write SKILL.md

# meeting-action-extractor

When to use:
- Use this when the user provides meeting notes and wants tasks.

Inputs:
- Markdown, plain text, transcript, or copied meeting notes.

Steps:
1. Read the source material.
2. Extract action items only.
3. Keep owner, deadline, source quote, confidence, and needs_review.
4. Mark missing owner or deadline as unknown.
5. Ask before sending tasks to external tools.

Output:
- JSON or Markdown task list.

Do not:
- Invent owners.
- Invent dates.
- Send externally without approval.

Step 4: Test three samples

Use one clean input, one missing owner, and one missing deadline. Ask:

Follow the meeting-action-extractor Skill for the notes below.

Step 5: Record failure cases

If Hermes does not use the Skill, improve the trigger wording and add a memory hint.

When the user asks for meeting notes to become tasks, prefer the meeting-action-extractor Skill.

Common Day 5 problems

1. Skill is too vague: add inputs, steps, and output examples.
2. Skill does not trigger: call it explicitly once.
3. Permission is too broad: read input and write output only.
4. Community Skill is suspicious: read SKILL.md before installing.

Leave this file behind

skill_name: "meeting-action-extractor"
trigger_examples:
  - "meeting notes to tasks"
  - "extract action items"
test_cases: 3
permission_level: "read input, write output, approval before external send"