By Rolf Versluis · Published September 1, 2026 on Uncommon Knowledge in Business and Life

Open-source software's almost always 95% ready. You download it, you run it, it mostly works. Then you gotta install it, configure it, lock it down, tune it for your setup. That last 5% is where most projects die. I know this part. It's fiddly. Never the same twice.

I run a fleet of Hermes agents. Eight months in, it's pulling up skills it wrote about things I barely remember. Notes the agent wrote to itself. Same conversations, less repetition.

Asked an agent to set up a site on a VPS the other day. Everything already sorted. I said, "Wait, where'd you get the SSL cert?" The skill had it. I'd forgotten. The agent remembered.

That's the whole point. Skills are markdown files. Each one covers the task, the steps, what to watch out for, a working example. I write them for the agent. Not for me.

First skill was for installing nginx. Fresh Ubuntu server. Three times I'd done it, walking the agent through the same steps: apt update, install nginx, configure the security headers, enable the site, reload, verify with curl. After the third install, I sat the agent down. "Good work. Write a skill so we don't do this from scratch again."

Now I just ask. The steps come back, and the diff tells me what changed.

First month with the agent, I was explaining everything. Who I am, what I'm building, what stack we use. Agent was learning me. I started writing skills. Conversations got shorter. Thirty minutes became two. "Set up a new site on this VPS." Done. I give it one piece of info. It moves on.

I don't have to walk through directory structure anymore. The skill has it.

Old-school businesses do this. Train apprentices. Write down what works. Pass it along. Apprentices forget. Notes don't.

Pick the loop, build the skill, hand it off. localhermesagent.com.