15.4 Core: Self-Evolving Skills Loop

☤ "Hermes' sharpest knife: let the Agent write its own skills and iterate them itself."

The Problem

Traditional Agent skills are hand-written (OpenClaw / Claude Code's SKILL.md). Two ceilings: incomplete coverage (humans can't pre-write everything) and no adaptation (skills don't follow a user's workflow change).

Hermes' answer is Self-Evolving Skills — after a task, the Agent itself distills the trajectory into a skill, then improves it in use.

The 5-Stage Loop

task done → ① evaluate → ② extract → ③ save draft → ④ iterate in use → ⑤ prune/reinforce

① Evaluate (should I extract?)

② Extract (SKILL.md)

Feed the trajectory to an LLM to produce structured SKILL.md (frontmatter + trigger + flow + constraints).

③ Save as Draft

~/.hermes/skills/summarize-inbox/
├── SKILL.md      # frontmatter status: draft
└── meta.json     # source trajectory, created time, confidence

Drafts are not immediately active — user approves first.

④ Iterate in Use (offline self-improve)

Each invocation records results; offline, DSPy/GEPA-style tuning reinforces successful steps and weakens failing ones.

⑤ Prune / Reinforce

Weekly review classifies skills: healthy (keep) / needs-improvement (self-improve) / dying (prompt user).

A Concrete Example

User: "organize my inbox, categorize by topic, and summarize."

1. Execute: Agent does it in 8 steps;
2. Evaluate: 8 ≥ 5 → worth distilling;
3. Extract: generates summarize-inbox skill (read→categorize→summarize→report);
4. Save draft;
5. Next time: "organize email" triggers the skill instead of re-planning;
6. Iterate: a mis-categorization is recorded and the rule corrected.

📌 A normal Agent re-plans from scratch on the 6th run; Hermes' 6th run uses its own skill, refined through 5 iterations.

vs a Human-Maintained Skill Library

Safety Boundary (Why It's Not "Out of Control")

1. Draft mechanism — new skills are status: draft until approved;
2. Security audit — distilled SKILL.md passes permission checks (tools/permissions);
3. Rollback — skills keep versions;
4. User veto — hermes skills disable <name> anytime.

hermes skills list              # active/draft/disabled with versions
hermes skills approve summarize-inbox
hermes skills rollback summarize-inbox v2

Section Summary

Next section: 15.5 Three-Layer Memory