Summary

Hermes Agent's skill format (~/.hermes/skills/<category>/<name>/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter) is ~99% compatible with the agentskills.io open standard — the spec now adopted by Anthropic, NVIDIA, and ~40 other clients. Two small changes would make Hermes strictly spec-compliant and allow Hermes-authored skills to be published to the agentskills.io directory.

Context

• Industry consolidation: The agentskills.io spec is becoming the de-facto interchange format for portable agent skills.
• NVIDIA adopted it wholesale on 2026-05-21, shipping 155 verified skills at NVIDIA/skills. Announcement: NVIDIA-Verified Agent Skills Provide Capability Governance for AI Agents.
• Verified live: NVIDIA's ptq skill drops into ~/.hermes/skills/ and loads in Hermes today with zero modifications — confirming the formats are already nearly identical.

The Gap

Hermes places tags and platforms as top-level frontmatter fields. The agentskills.io spec puts agent-specific fields under a metadata: block. Hermes already does this correctly for metadata.hermes.conditions etc., so the convention is already established — tags/platforms are the last holdouts.

Current (Hermes):

---
name: my-skill
description: ...
tags: [foo, bar]
platforms: [cli, telegram]
metadata:
  hermes:
    conditions: [...]
---

Spec-compliant:

---
name: my-skill
description: ...
metadata:
  tags: [foo, bar]
  platforms: [cli, telegram]
  hermes:
    conditions: [...]
---

Proposed Fix

Two small, backward-compatible changes:

1. Update the official VCG/Hermes skill template + skill_manage tool to emit tags and platforms under metadata: instead of top-level when authoring new skills.

2. Loader shim in agent/skill_utils.py (around line 104 where frontmatter.get('platforms') is read) — also check frontmatter.get('metadata', {}).get('platforms') and metadata.tags. ~2 lines, fully backward-compatible with every existing Hermes skill in the wild.

Why It Matters

• Publishable: Hermes-authored skills become directly publishable to the agentskills.io directory with no rewriting.
• Bidirectional ecosystem compat: Hermes already reads NVIDIA/Anthropic skills; this closes the loop so Hermes skills flow outward too.
• Tiny diff, zero breakage: Loader shim preserves all existing skills; template update only affects new authoring.

Happy to send a PR if maintainers agree on the approach.