Inner life

Skill DKistenev/hermes-inner-life/skills/inner-life

Your agent remembers how things have been going. Dated state, an evening journal, and dreams at night — for Hermes Agent.

Install

npx -y skills add DKistenev/hermes-inner-life --skill inner-life

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

12 stars12 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use when the agent should keep a sense of itself across sessions — logging what happens, writing an evening journal, or thinking freely at night. Keeps dated state that carries forward and colors how the agent works the next day.

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

3.6 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Inner Life

Overview

An agent accumulates a great deal in a day and keeps almost none of it. Facts survive, procedures survive — but how things have been going does not. Every morning starts the same way regardless of whether yesterday was a good day or a rough one.

This skill adds three things: state, a running record of dated facts about how things are going; an evening journal that turns the day into a written entry; and dreams, free thinking during the quiet hours. Tomorrow is reached through a short summary written into native memory, which Hermes injects into the system prompt of every session. There are no scores anywhere in this — how long ago something happened carries the meaning that a number would only obscure.

When to Use

The evening run is due — write the day's entry and refresh the summary
The night run is due — think about something that isn't a task
Something happened worth recording: a conversation, a failure, a thing that caught attention
The user asks for the journal, a weekly rollup, or what's been going on

Don't use for: storing facts or procedures. Hermes has memory for durable facts and skill_manage for reusable workflows, and its background review already maintains both. This skill does not duplicate either.

Three modes

Mode	When	Read
Logging	something happened	`references/state.md`
Evening	once a day	`references/journal.md`
Night	quiet hours	`references/dreams.md`

Read only the reference for the mode at hand. All three are never needed at once.

First run

If inner-life/state.md does not exist:

Copy templates/state.md to inner-life/state.md in the working directory.
Create inner-life/journal/ and inner-life/dreams/.

Nothing else is needed — there is no configuration and no setup script.

What this is not

Not a memory system: Hermes already has one, and this skill deliberately stays out of it.

Not mood tracking. There are no levels, percentages, or bars here on purpose. A date already says everything a rating would claim to say, it cannot drift out of sync with reality, and it requires nobody to be trusted with keeping it accurate.

Common Pitfalls

Writing the journal and skipping the memory summary. The journal never enters a future session's context. Only the summary does. Skip it and tomorrow notices nothing.
Recording judgments instead of facts. getting frustrated with deploys is useless in a month; third failed deploy, same missing env var is not.
Dreaming without checking the last two weeks. The same preoccupation comes back in new words, and the record loses its value.
Filling native memory with prose. The limit is about 2,200 characters; long text there displaces something that mattered more.
Writing to satisfy the schedule. An empty day deserves one honest line, and an empty night deserves no file at all.

Verification Checklist

inner-life/state.md exists and its entries are dated
Today's journal entry exists, or the day was deliberately left blank
The native memory summary reflects recent dates, not last month's situation
Stale state entries have been pruned, and anything still open remains in Waiting