Best Hermes Agent Skills I’d Reinstall Immediately

by Sunil Kumar DashMay 13, 202610 min read
ListicleAI Use Case

Hermes agents are running riot on the internet. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop: it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions.

I've been running Hermes for most of my growth and marketing work for the past 15 days. Before that, I was on OpenClaw. The reason I switched comes down to one thing: predictability. Hermes just works. OpenClaw gave me some genuinely painful experiences in its heyday, and I got tired of fighting it.

It's a fast-growing project, close to 150k GitHub stars and a seriously vibrant community. And like Claude Code or OpenClaw, you can augment Hermes with skills to handle more work with less friction.

A few skills in particular have noticeably improved how Hermes runs for me. These ten are the survivors, the ones I'd reinstall on a fresh Hermes setup before I did anything else. Most came up repeatedly across r/ClaudeAI, the Hermes Discord, and the various awesome-claude-skills GitHub lists. A few I just personally lean on for marketing work and won't shut up about.

A few notes before we dive in:

  • Format. Hermes follows the agentskills.io open standard — the same SKILL.md format Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenClaw, OpenCode, and friends use.

  • Install location. Hermes loads skills from ~/.hermes/skills/ (per-user) or ./skills/ (per-project).

  • The skills below are model-invoked. You don't call them. The agent decides when to load them based on the description: in each skill's frontmatter.

TL;DR:

  1. Obra Superpowers: Adds operating discipline to Hermes with brainstorming, TDD, systematic debugging, subagents, and verification gates.

  2. Composio Universal CLI + Skill: Connects Hermes to Gmail, Sheets, Slack, CRMs, and 1,000+ SaaS tools without hand-rolling OAuth.

  3. Obsidian Skills: Turns your Obsidian vault into a read-write knowledge base Hermes can search, update, and build on.

  4. Defuddle: Cleans web pages into token-efficient reader-mode markdown before Hermes reads them.

  5. Taste-Skill: Stops generic AI-looking UI by pushing Hermes toward stronger visual taste and more varied design.

  6. SEO + GEO Skills: Gives Hermes a growth workflow for keyword research, content gaps, SEO optimization, and AI-engine visibility.

  7. Humanizer: Rewrites AI-flavored copy so it sounds more natural, specific, and closer to your voice.

  8. Claudeception: Helps Hermes turn hard-won solutions into reusable skills it can retrieve later.

  9. Playwright Skill: Teaches Hermes production-grade Playwright testing patterns instead of brittle tutorial-style tests.

  10. Reflexion: Adds a self-review loop so Hermes critiques and improves its own output before handing it over.

Top Hermes Skills in 2026

1. Obra Superpowers: The Operating Discipline

If you install one skill pack, make it this. obra/superpowers by Jesse Vincent isn't really a skill. It's a complete software-development methodology bolted onto your agent. It overrides the default "rush to produce output" behavior that every LLM ships with.

What you actually get:

  • brainstorming: Before any code, the agent teases out a real spec from the conversation, shows it back in chunks short enough to read, and waits for sign-off.

  • test-driven-development: Strict RED-GREEN-REFACTOR. Deletes any code written before a failing test exists. Yes, really.

  • systematic-debugging: Fires on any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior before the agent proposes a fix. Kills the symptom-patching reflex.

  • subagent-driven-development: Pairs beautifully with Hermes' native subagents. Dispatches a fresh agent per task with two-stage review.

  • verification-before-completion: Forces fresh verification commands before the agent claims success. Has saved me from a dozen "all done!" moments that weren't.

npx skills add obra/superpowers --target ~/.hermes/skills

# Or clone directly
git clone <https://github.com/obra/superpowers.git> ~/.hermes/skills/superpowers

2. Composio Universal CLI + Skill: The Integration Layer

Hermes ships with around 40 built-in tools. The moment you want to draft a Gmail, update a Google Sheet, post to Slack, or hit any of 1,000+ SaaS apps, you hit the wall.

Composio is how you get past it without spending a day wiring OAuth.

You have two ways in, and you can either use the CLI (recommended) or the MCP server:

  • The CLI route: Install the composio command, then the agent calls it like any other shell tool. Lighter on tokens and better for multi-step chaining.

  • The MCP route: Point Hermes at https://connect.composio.dev/mcp, and Tool Router dynamically loads only the tools the task needs. No 200-tool context bloat.

These two essentially do the same thing but different approaches.

The Composio skill teaches the agent the right way to use Composio, tool discovery, authentication, using remote workbench. The CLI has everything the agent needs to execute tasks in your connected apps.

With these your Hermes agent will be able to interact with any apps you’d like

# Install the Composio CLI
curl -fsSL https://composio.dev/install | bash

# Authenticate one time
composio login

For the MCP path, drop this into your Hermes config at ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

mcp_servers:
  composio:
    url: "https://connect.composio.dev/mcp"
    headers:
      x-consumer-api-key: "YOUR_COMPOSIO_API_KEY"
    connect_timeout: 60
    timeout: 180

Restart the hermes, and simply ask your agent to connect to Slack via Composio, or simply request any Slack-related task. Hermes will prompt you to authenticate and authorize access.

Resources:

3. Obsidian Skills — your second brain becomes the agent's first brain

If you do any knowledge work, this one is non-negotiable. kepano/obsidian-skills — written by Steph Ango (Obsidian's CEO) — gives your agent full read-write access to your vault.

What's in the pack:

  • obsidian-cli — read, create, search, append, manage tasks and properties from the command line.

  • obsidian-markdown — teaches the agent Obsidian Flavored Markdown.

  • json-canvas — work with .canvas files for visual maps.

  • obsidian-bases — database-like views over your notes.

  • defuddle — extract clean markdown from web pages.

The unlock is bidirectional. Hermes can pull context from your notes ("what did I write about that campaign last month?") and push new findings back. It stops being a chatbot you copy-paste in and out of.

If you want to push your notes to other tools — auto-create Notion pages from meeting notes, or save research to Google Drive — wire those in through Composio (#2).

bash

git clone https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-skills.git ~/.hermes/skills/obsidian-skills

Resources:

4. Defuddle — token-efficient web reading

Defuddle ships as part of the Obsidian pack but earns its own slot. Every web page Hermes fetches is 90% navigation, ads, related-content sidebars, and footer junk. You pay tokens for all of it.

Defuddle runs the page through a reader-mode extractor before the agent ever sees the content. Same information, often 5-10x fewer tokens. For research-heavy days this is a permanent context-window win.

bash

npm install -g defuddle-cli

Resources:

5. Taste-Skill — stop the generic UI slop

Every LLM has the same defaults: Inter font, purple gradient, three-column hero, "Get started" button, soft shadow on every card. It works, but it screams "AI made this."

Leonxlnx/taste-skill is built specifically to override those defaults. It's a senior-UI/UX-engineer skill with three tunable knobs:

  • DESIGN_VARIANCE (1–10) — Perfect symmetry → artsy chaos

  • MOTION_INTENSITY (1–10) — Static → cinematic

  • VISUAL_DENSITY (1–10) — Art gallery airy → pilot cockpit packed

The pack also ships variants: gpt-taste, soft-skill, minimalist-skill, brutalist-skill, and image-to-code-skill for a "generate → analyze → code" pipeline. For landing pages, this is the difference between something you'd ship and something you'd start over on.

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --target ~/.hermes/skills

Resources:

6. SEO + GEO Skills — 20 skills made for growth work

This is the closest thing to "marketing in a box" for agent skills. aaron-he-zhu/seo-geo-claude-skills ships 20 skills covering the whole SEO/GEO lifecycle:

  • Research — keyword research, competitor analysis, content-gap analysis

  • Build — SEO content writer, GEO content optimizer, meta-tag optimizer, schema generator

  • Optimize — on-page auditor, technical SEO checker, content-quality auditor

  • Monitor — rank tracking, backlink analyzer, performance reporter

The GEO half ("Generative Engine Optimization" — getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews instead of just ranking on Google) is the genuinely novel bit. There's a /seo:geo-drift-check command that validates whether your GEO score actually matches AI-engine citations.

Zero dependencies. Hook up Google Search Console or an SEO tool like Ahrefs through Composio (#2) and it gets much more powerful.

npx skills add aaron-he-zhu/seo-geo-claude-skills --target ~/.hermes/skills

Resources:

7. Humanizer — remove the AI tells from your writing

Every piece of agent-generated copy has the same problem: it reads like agent-generated copy. The em-dashes. The "It's not just X, it's Y." The lists of three. The signposting headers. Readers feel it before they can name it.

blader/humanizer is a skill engineered specifically to detect and rewrite those patterns. You can paste a sample of your own writing first and it'll voice-match to your sentence rhythm, word choices, and quirks. Or just run it raw and get text that doesn't scream "ChatGPT did this."

git clone https://github.com/blader/humanizer.git ~/.hermes/skills/humanizer

For me, this is the skill I run on every blog draft and every cold email before it leaves the building.

Resources:

8. Claudeception — Hermes learns from itself

blader/Claudeception is the skill that makes Hermes' built-in learning loop noticeably sharper. When the agent solves a non-obvious problem — a weird debugging session, a workaround that took trial-and-error to find, a project-specific pattern it figured out — it writes that knowledge back as a new skill with a trigger description optimized for future retrieval.

The agent doesn't just save the solution; it saves it under the exact phrasing that'll surface it the next time the same kind of problem comes up. The idea comes from academic work on skill libraries for AI agents (Voyager, Wang et al., 2023).

It pairs really well with Hermes' native memory loop. The native loop captures what happened; Claudeception captures what worked, why, and how to retrieve it later.

git clone https://github.com/blader/Claudeception.git ~/.hermes/skills/claudeception
mkdir -p ~/.hermes/hooks
cp ~/.hermes/skills/claudeception/scripts/claudeception-activator.sh ~/.hermes/hooks/
chmod +x ~/.hermes/hooks/claudeception-activator.sh

Resources:

9. Playwright Skill — 70+ production-tested testing patterns

testdino-hq/playwright-skill is the most thorough Playwright pack I've seen. It covers 70+ patterns including E2E flows, Page Object Model, CI/CD integration, test migrations, and CLI usage.

The reason this earns a slot: it actually teaches the agent the production patterns that don't break six months later. If Hermes is writing tests for your app, you want it writing them like a senior QA engineer wrote them, not like a tutorial copy-paste. Wire results into Linear or GitHub Issues through Composio and the loop closes — tests fail, tickets file themselves.

npx skills add testdino-hq/playwright-skill --target ~/.hermes/skills
npm install -g playwright
playwright install chromium

Resources:

10. Reflexion — self-refinement loop

The last slot was a toss-up; this won because it compounds. NeoLabHQ/reflexion implements a self-refinement loop: the agent reflects on its previous output, identifies what's weak or wrong, and corrects itself before showing you the result.

It sounds like it'd be slow. It is, slightly. But the output quality jump on anything substantive — code, copy, analysis — is real. For one-shot trivia it's overkill; for anything you'd actually ship, it's the difference between "first draft" and "second draft" without you having to ask for the second draft.

bash

npx skills add NeoLabHQ/reflexion --target ~/.hermes/skills

Pair it with verification-before-completion from Superpowers (#1) and you get a double-tap quality gate: the agent reflects on its output, fixes the obvious problems, then runs real verification before claiming done.

Resources:

A few honest caveats before I wrap

  • Don't install everything blind. Skills shape the agent's default behavior. The more you stack, the more decisions get made for you. Run with the top 3 (Superpowers, Composio, Obsidian).

  • The descriptions matter more than the bodies. When a skill doesn't fire when you expect it to, the fix is almost always in the frontmatter description:, not the instructions below.

  • Vet anything you grab from a random repo. Skills run real code in your agent's environment. The community has been good about flagging bad actors, but the bar to publish is low. Read the SKILL.md before you install.

That's the stack. Hermes Agenr is really good and I hope they g upwards from here.

S
AuthorSunil Kumar Dash

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