Starting with a blank slate
By default every profile is seeded with the bundled skill catalog, and each hermes update adds any newly bundled skills. If you want a profile with no bundled skills - and that stays empty across updates - you have two paths: At install time (applies to the default ~/.hermes profile): the installer has no --no-skills flag. Its setup stage asks whether to seed the bundled catalog when you pick the Blank Slate setup; answering no writes the opt-out marker described below. Non-interactive installs seed the catalog, so run hermes skills opt-out afterwards if you want the profile empty. At profile-create time (named profiles): On an already-installed profile (default or named), toggle it at runtime: All of these paths write a .no-bundled-skills marker into the profile directory. While the marker is present, the installer, hermes update , and any skill sync all skip bundled-skill seeding for that profile. Delete the marker (or run hermes skills opt-in ) to re-enable. Safe by default hermes skills opt-out only stops future seeding - it never deletes anything already on disk. The optional --remove flag deletes bundled skills only when they are unmodified (byte-identical to the version Herm…
From the official Hermes Agent documentation.
hermes profile create research --no-skills