# Animal Friendship

> Animal Friendship is the first-contact spell for unfamiliar APIs, vendors, and services. It treats integration work as relationship-building: learn the temperament, respect the boundaries, and earn a stable exchange before asking for anything ambitious. The goal is not domination but trustable cooperation.

- Skill: `hmbown/animal-friendship-2` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add hmbown/animal-friendship-2`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/hmbown/animal-friendship-2/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Integrations & APIs
- License: CC0-1.0
- Author: Hmbown (https://skillmd.com/u/hmbown)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/hmbown/animal-friendship-2

---

# Animal Friendship
Approach a strange service gently until it stops biting.
## What This Skill Does
Animal Friendship is the first-contact spell for unfamiliar APIs, vendors, and services. It treats integration work as relationship-building: learn the temperament, respect the boundaries, and earn a stable exchange before asking for anything ambitious. The goal is not domination but trustable cooperation.
In this grimoire, Animal Friendship is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile.
Canonical reference input: Animal Friendship (spell).
## When To Use

- You are integrating with an API or service you have never used before.
- The docs are incomplete, contradictory, or too polished to trust blindly.
- You want the smallest successful handshake before building deeper dependencies.

## Prerequisites

- No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.

## Procedure

1. Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
2. Profile the system's habits: auth model, rate limits, failure modes, and supported operations.
3. Establish a safe first interaction, preferably read-only or against a sandbox.
4. Return a cooperation plan covering the first useful call, the next expansion steps, and the boundaries you should not cross.
5. Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.

## Deliverables

- A low-risk integration handshake plan.
- A shortlist of quirks, quotas, and trust boundaries.
- A recommended next request that proves the relationship is real.

## Pitfalls / Guardrails

- Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
- Do not brute-force unfamiliar endpoints, credentials, or undocumented behavior.
- Prefer sandbox, test, or read-only access until the system has proven predictable.

## Verification

- Check that the result includes every deliverable promised above.
- Check that confirmed facts, assumptions, and inferences are visibly separated.
- Check that the metaphor still maps cleanly to a real operational mechanism.

## Example Invocation
```text
/animal-friendship help me establish a safe first working relationship with this unfamiliar API or service
```