Skill Broker

September 20, 2026 · View on GitHub

Intervene with the right authorised guidance before the agent acts.

Skill Broker is a deterministic skill-intervention layer for Hermes agents. Before the main agent's first model call, it evaluates an incoming request, selects a small set of relevant skills from that profile's authorised catalog, validates the selection in code, and supplies the selected skill content to the current agent turn.

Authority, limits, and routing decisions live in deterministic code. Jev — a narrow semantic judgment model — only expresses relevance and confidence, and never grants access.

Why

Hermes currently renders every enabled skill's name and description into agent context on every turn. The live library is large, contains duplicate names from mixed owners, and mixes frequent foundation skills with rarely relevant specialised ones. This costs context on every turn and forces agents to notice and load skills deliberately.

Skill Broker keeps a small foundation set native to Hermes, brokers the larger specialised library, and produces replayable evidence for every routing decision.

Status

Stages 1–4 are built and one Consumer is live. The Skill Broker's deterministic pipeline is implemented through ticket #55: the prepare_turn seam, Authorised Closure, Candidate Retrieval, Judgment validation and the Grant, Skill Pack assembly with Pack Delivery and duplicate suppression, the live Jev Judgment Source with its recorded/No-Skill fallback, the Hermes Adapter at the cache-safe seam in Shadow Mode, the machine-local Replay Corpus with Reviewed Cases and SHA-bound Recordings, the offline routing evaluation with its pre-registered Soft Thresholds, and the injection gate: the data-independent Hard Gates checked on every turn, fail-closed with a recorded Incident, and the per-batch injection switch. The Shadow Report and its batch review assemble recorded Route Decisions and observed skill use into the reviewed artifact whose review is the only thing that enables a batch. Injection stays off by default. The remaining gate is #53's Brokered-withholding decision before the bounded pilot (#57).

Canonical documents:

Delivery stages

  1. Verified audit
  2. Canonical catalog
  3. Non-breaking library repair
  4. Profile policies
  5. Offline routing evaluation
  6. Shadow-mode Hermes integration
  7. Bounded intervention pilot
  8. Measured expansion
  9. Retirement review

The migration is additive and reversible. No skill or old path is deleted without explicit approval.