Large sources become knowledge-base skills
When the source is a book, a stack of papers, a spec, or a large docs folder, the agent doesn't cram it into one file or reduce it to a lossy summary. Instead it authors an expansive knowledge-base skill : a lean SKILL.md carrying the source's core mental models plus an index, with one distilled file per chapter or topic under references/ (plus a glossary or cheatsheet when the source earns them). Reference files cost nothing until a question needs one - the agent loads them on demand with skill_view , so query cost stays proportional to the answer, not the source. Re-running /learn with new material on the same topic folds it into the existing skill rather than creating a duplicate. The distillation synthesizes structure - frameworks, definitions, decision rules, anti-patterns - and never reproduces passages of the source text. Because the live agent does the sourcing, /learn works the same in the CLI, the messaging gateway, the TUI, and the dashboard - and on any terminal backend (local, Docker, remote), since there is no separate ingestion engine. In the dashboard , the Skills page has a Learn a skill button that opens a panel with a directory field, a URL field, and an open-end…
From the official Hermes Agent documentation.