Hermes
Core concepts

Skills

The GIS skill library, versioned as markdown and pulled from GitHub.

A skill is a markdown file the agent pulls into context when it is relevant. Skills follow the agentskills.io open standard, so they are portable across Hermes profiles. The library is cloned into ~/.hermes/skills/gis/.

The library

The configuration ships 21 GIS skills, including:

SkillPurpose
arcgis-rest-service-validatorValidate public ArcGIS REST services before use
arcgis-rest-to-product-appTurn ArcGIS REST layers into product-grade apps
esri-experience-builderScaffold Experience Builder apps and widgets
geospatial-data-qa-pipelineQA across ArcGIS REST, GeoPandas, DuckDB, Shapely
open-source-gis-stack-builderMapLibre, OpenLayers, Leaflet, deck.gl, GeoPandas, DuckDB
spatial-ai-operations-consoleAgentic spatial question answering
static-vector-tile-product-appPMTiles and static vector tile apps
feature-style-cookbookCartographic styling recipes

The remaining skills cover app scaffolds, style bundles, dataset fetching, dashboard QA, and productized GIS offers.

Anatomy

~/.hermes/skills/gis/parcels.md
# Parcel lookups

APNs are formatted `NNN-NNNN-NNN`. The authoritative layer is
`Parcels/FeatureServer/0`. Never report acreage from `GIS_ACRES`;
use `DEED_ACRES`. Prefer the `postgis` tool for bulk queries and the
`esri` tool for single-address lookups.

Why markdown, in a repo

Skills live in a GitHub repo, so they get code review, git history, and diffs. When your schema changes, you edit a file and merge a pull request. No retraining, and you can see exactly which skill version produced which answer.

Keep skills small and single-purpose. The agent selects the relevant ones per request, so ten focused skills beat one sprawling file.

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