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If you have been following along here, you already know I installed Hermes Agent on my Hetzner VM a few weeks back and named it Lollie. It sits alongside my existing AI setup, handles tasks over Telegram, and has been quietly getting more useful the longer it runs. One of the things I have been watching closely is the skills ecosystem, because that is where things get interesting fast.

Shopify just shipped an official skill for Hermes. That means your AI assistant can now manage your store, products, orders, and inventory through conversation. No clicking through dashboards. Just talk to it. That is the hook that got me writing this post, but the real story is bigger than Shopify. The skills library has grown to 666+ skills at the time of writing and new ones are being added every week.

Before we get into the list, let me explain what skills actually are.

What Are Hermes Agent Skills?

Hermes Agent is a free, open-source AI assistant built by Nous Research. Unlike the AI tools most people use in a browser tab, Hermes lives on your own server or computer, remembers everything across sessions, and gets better the longer you use it. Think of it as an AI assistant that actually builds a working knowledge of how you operate over time rather than starting from scratch every conversation.

Skills are the add-ons that extend what Hermes can do. Each skill is essentially a structured instruction document that tells your agent how to handle a specific type of task. When you need that skill, your agent loads it and gets to work. When you do not need it, it stays out of the way.

Of the 666+ skills currently available, 86 come built-in with every Hermes install, 59 are official optional skills you can add with a single command, and 521 are community-built skills contributed by developers and enthusiasts around the world. The ecosystem is moving fast. What exists today will look very different in three months.

Here are 10 worth knowing about right now, chosen specifically for people who are curious about AI but are not necessarily developers.

1. Shopify

This is the one that sparked this post. Shopify built and published their own official Hermes skill, which means it is well-maintained and trustworthy rather than a community experiment. Once connected, your agent can manage products, update inventory, create orders, and handle customer records through conversation.

The practical angle here is not just for big businesses. If you run a print-on-demand shop or a small side hustle on Shopify, this changes how you interact with your store. Instead of logging in to make a price change or check an order, you send a message.

What you need: A Shopify account and API credentials. Shopify has a free trial but the platform itself requires a paid plan to stay live.

Difficulty: moderate. There is an authentication setup step that takes about ten minutes if you follow the documentation.

2. YouTube Content

You paste a YouTube link and your agent turns it into something useful. Summaries, chapter breakdowns, blog post drafts, Twitter threads, study notes. Whatever you need from the content of that video.

This one is genuinely useful for anyone who watches YouTube to learn. I have been in situations where a 45-minute tutorial covers one thing I actually needed and nothing else. With this skill, you get the relevant part extracted and formatted before you even press play.

What you need: Nothing. No API keys, no accounts. It is built-in and works immediately.

Difficulty: very easy.

3. Humanizer

This skill takes any piece of text and rewrites it to sound like a real person wrote it. Strip out the robotic AI patterns, the overused phrases, the telltale structure that gives AI writing away immediately.

If you use AI to help draft emails, posts, or documents and then spend time editing them to sound like yourself, this saves that step. You run it through the humanizer and the agent does the rewriting for you.

What you need: Nothing. No external accounts. Built-in skill.

Difficulty: very easy.

4. Google Workspace

Connect your Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Docs, and Sheets to your agent. Once this is set up, your agent can see your schedule, help you draft and send emails, pull documents, and update spreadsheets through conversation.

The interesting shift here is that your agent stops being a standalone tool and starts having context about your actual life. Ask it to schedule something and it knows what is already in your calendar. Ask it to summarise your week and it can actually look.

What you need: A Google account, which most people already have. There is an OAuth setup step where you authorise Hermes to access your account.

Difficulty: moderate. The authorisation flow is guided but takes a few steps.

5. Memento Flashcards

This one is for students and self-learners. Memento is a spaced repetition flashcard system built directly into your agent. Tell it a fact you want to remember and it saves it as a flashcard. When it is time to review based on the spaced repetition schedule, your agent quizzes you.

The part that stood out to me is the YouTube integration. You can give it a YouTube video link and ask it to generate flashcards from the transcript. Watch a lecture, get quizzed on it two days later when your brain is ready to consolidate the information. No external apps, no syncing.

What you need: Nothing. No accounts, no API keys. Everything is stored locally.

Difficulty: very easy.

6. Canvas LMS

Canvas is the learning management platform used by thousands of universities and colleges around the world. If your institution uses it, this skill connects your agent to your course dashboard. You can ask what assignments are due this week, check submission deadlines, and browse your active courses without opening a browser.

For students juggling multiple courses, having your AI assistant pull that information on demand rather than hunting through tabs is a small but meaningful quality of life improvement.

What you need: A Canvas account through your institution and an API token generated from your Canvas settings. The catch is that some universities restrict API access for students so it is worth checking before you get excited.

Difficulty: low once you have the token.

7. Telephony

This is the most jaw-dropping skill on the list. Once set up, your Hermes agent can send SMS messages and make phone calls on your behalf. You tell it to text someone, it texts them. You set up an AI phone agent, it takes calls while you are busy.

The technology behind it uses Twilio for the messaging and calling layer, with options to add AI-driven voice calling through platforms like Bland.ai or Vapi. The possibilities here are genuinely strange in the best way.

What you need: A Twilio account, which has a free trial but becomes paid once you scale beyond testing. For AI calling you would also need a Bland.ai or Vapi account, both of which have free tiers.

Difficulty: moderate to high. This involves setting up third-party accounts and entering API keys, but the skill documentation walks you through it.

8. Image Generation

Tell your agent what you want to see and it generates an image. The default setup uses FLUX models via FAL.ai, which produces genuinely good results and supports nine different models at various speed and quality tradeoffs.

For content creators, this is immediately useful. Need a featured image for a blog post? A concept visual for a social caption? Describe it in plain language and your agent generates it without you leaving the conversation.

What you need: A FAL.ai account with an API key. FAL.ai has a free tier to get started, then charges per image beyond that. If you have a paid Nous Portal subscription, you can skip the FAL key entirely and use image generation through the portal.

Difficulty: easy once you have the API key.

9. Fitness Trainer

A community-built skill that turns your agent into a personal trainer. Give it your goals, the equipment you have access to, and your available time, and it builds a personalised workout plan. It can track progress, adjust plans based on feedback, and give guidance on specific exercises.

It is not a replacement for a real trainer for anything serious, but for someone who wants a structured starting point without paying for a gym app subscription, it does the job in a conversational way that most fitness apps do not.

What you need: Nothing. No accounts, no payments. Community skill so quality may vary between Hermes versions but the core functionality is solid.

Difficulty: very easy.

10. Detective Game

Your agent hosts a murder mystery game. It presents a case, you ask questions, interrogate suspects, and try to solve it through conversation. No setup, no downloads, no accounts. Just tell your agent you want to play and it runs the whole thing.

This is the skill that shows what an AI assistant with memory and context actually feels like when you stop asking it to do work and just let it play. It is genuinely fun, and it is a good entry point for anyone who wants to experience what Hermes can do before committing to anything more involved.

What you need: Nothing at all.

Difficulty: zero.

The Bigger Picture

What strikes me about this list is how different it is from what you would have found in the skills library two months ago. Shopify shipping an official skill is a signal. When a company with millions of merchants builds a first-party integration for an open-source AI agent framework, something has shifted.

I have been running Lollie on my VM and watching what gets added to the skills hub. The pattern is clear: the ecosystem is moving from developer tools toward genuinely everyday capabilities. The question worth asking is not whether any of this is useful. It clearly is. The question is which skills fit your actual life, and whether the setup friction is worth what you get on the other side.

For most of these, the answer is yes. And if you want to stay close to what gets added next, the skills ecosystem is moving fast enough that it is worth keeping an eye on. I cover this kind of thing regularly over at the August Wheel newsletter. Come join the list at newsletter.augustwheel.com and I will keep you in the loop as the interesting ones keep dropping.