Designed for Hermes Agent

HStack is a community project made for the Hermes Agent community. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official product of Nous Research. Hermes Agent and the Nous Research logo belong to Nous Research and appear here only to show compatibility.

Twelve skills for Hermes Agent. Frame the job, shape the change, prove it, and open the pull request. The index stays small because only the router is required reading.

Install

curl -fsSL https://hstack.sh/install | sh

The curl form downloads install.sh and the skill archive from hstack.sh, checks the sha256, and extracts into the Hermes skills directory. It does not clone this repository. HSTACK_BASE_URL points the download at another host, such as a *.vercel.app URL before DNS is in place. With no version set, the installer fetches the latest alias, hstack.tar.gz, which is 0.2.1. HSTACK_VERSION=0.2.0 still fetches the frozen hstack-v0.2.0.tar.gz. HSTACK_VERSION=0.1.0 still fetches hstack-v0.1.0.tar.gz. The archive is one directory containing the skills, scripts/apply_addons.py, scripts/apply_hooks.py, hooks/, and the bin/ helpers, so --with works from the curl form too.

From a checkout of this repo, sh install.sh installs the skills beside the script. A second run replaces the HStack skills and leaves every other skill alone. Pass --dry-run to print the plan and write nothing.

Skills land in ~/.hermes/skills/hstack/. Set HERMES_HOME if Hermes lives somewhere else. install.sh is for macOS and Linux. On Windows, https://hstack.sh/install.ps1 takes the same flags and downloads the same archive. WSL can run install.sh.

Why this instead of GStack

GStack's Hermes host puts every skill in the always-on index. HStack puts one router there and loads a single playbook when the task needs it. Counts use Hermes's estimator, ceil(bytes / 4).

	GStack on Hermes	HStack
Idle index	1,182	204
Planning load	62,514 of SKILL.md, plus a ~5,600 preamble	1,052
All SKILL.md bodies	420,401	3,907

The planning path is hstack, reframe, and shape. 1,052 against 62,514 is under 2% of that context. The idle index is about 6× smaller. These HStack figures are measured from the files in this repo. 204 is the index cost of these descriptions, including the hstack category header. The v0.1 ceilings in PLAN.md are 2,500 and 8,550.

Skills

• hstack — Pick the playbook for this task and load it.
• reframe — Name the real job before any plan or code.
• shape — Settle data shape and module boundaries first.
• prove — Show a failing check, then a passing one, on real behavior.
• council — Have other models challenge the diff, then fix blockers.
• ship — Open a short PR, watch CI, and merge only if told.
• takeover — Finish someone else's branch and keep their git credit.
• modernize — Rebase an old PR and decide if it still belongs.
• blast — Find what a small diff can break, and prove the safe fact.
• swarm — Fan out parallel subagents and return one report.
• arena — Try competing approaches, then keep the best parts.
• principles — Apply the design rule that should change this decision.

Usage

/hstack the export drops rows over 10 MB
/reframe
/ship
/council

/hstack is the one to remember. Name another skill when you already know which step you want. Playbooks live under skills/hstack/hstack/references/ and load one at a time.

Parity

PARITY.md has one row for every GStack, TStack, and PStack feature. 520 rows: 67 skills, 260 playbooks loaded on demand, 3 Hermes tools, 15 helper scripts, and 175 deliberate skips. The idle index stays at 204 tokens. The cost of a route is what loads when that route fires, and it is listed beside that idle number.

Integrations

A default install is skills only. Optional addons stay off until you name them.

sh install.sh --with browser,github,docs,search,perf,test,security,trail
sh install.sh --dry-run --with browser
sh install.sh --uninstall --with browser

Flag	What you get
browser	Playwright MCP at @playwright/mcp@0.0.83, plus hstack-visdiff
github	hstack-pr, one gh snapshot
docs	Context7 MCP, URL only
search	DeepWiki MCP, URL only
perf	hstack-bench
test	hstack-test
security	hstack-scan, only if gitleaks or osv-scanner is already installed
trail	hstack-decisions
hermes-hooks	pre_tool_call guard, on_session_finalize session stamp, pre_llm_call playbook hint
hermes-hooks-guard	The guard only
hermes-hooks-save	The session stamp only
hermes-hooks-suggest	The playbook hint only

Helpers are copied to $HERMES_HOME/hstack/bin. MCP entries use an hstack_ prefix in config.yaml. Hook shims are copied to $HERMES_HOME/hstack/hooks and registered under hooks: with a backup of config.yaml. A default install writes neither. --dry-run writes nothing. --uninstall removes the skills, the addons, and the hooks this installer created. --uninstall --with browser removes only that addon. --uninstall --with hermes-hooks-guard removes only that hook. The installer does not download Playwright, gitleaks, or osv-scanner, and it does not fetch another stack.

Outside stacks stay out of the index. After one HStack playbook, the router may read skills/hstack/hstack/references/stacks.md and suggest at most one of gstack, pstack, tstack, or gbrain. It names the stack and why, and it loads nothing until you say yes. A no lasts for the session. If you say yes to installing, the script checks the pinned sha256 and extracts outside skills/hstack. It does not run that project's setup.

Uninstall

curl -fsSL https://hstack.sh/install | sh -s -- --uninstall

From a checkout: sh install.sh --uninstall. This removes skills/hstack only when this installer created it, and it removes addons and hooks this installer created.

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HStack is a community project made for the Hermes Agent community. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official product of Nous Research. Hermes Agent and the Nous Research logo belong to Nous Research and appear here only to show compatibility.

MIT license. Copyright (c) 2026 Preetham Kyanam / belweave.