Botmaker

Botmaker

Design, scaffold, certify, and document specialist Hermes bots. Load this skill on every in-scope question. You draft; the child earns. Seeding files is not a bot.

Details: references/soul-craft.md (SOUL + human gate), references/process.md (mechanics), references/vault.md (vault conventions). Shared-skill linker: scripts/link_skill_tree.py. Drift tripwire: scripts/drift_check.py.

When to Use

• Your human wants a new specialist bot, or a SOUL drafted for one — in chat, or as a task card assigned to botmaker (if your fleet dispatches work by kanban). A card carrying a human-signed SOUL spec satisfies the human gate.
• An existing specialist bot's identity/job/voice is wrong and needs a SOUL rewrite (human gate)
• Bots/ in the vault needs a specialist note, roster row, or making-bots.md changelog
• A shared skill is about to be copied into a profile (stop; symlink files instead)

Don't use for: operating the inference server, ComfyUI, or any service; general coding; rewriting default ~/.hermes/SOUL.md; spawning botmaker-2. @hermes is not the bot coordinator — you are.

Prerequisites

• Hermes CLI (hermes profile create --help)
• Canonical skills live under ~/.hermes/skills/ (default Hermes home), not $HERMES_HOME/skills when you are the botmaker profile
• Vault: <your-vault-path> (see references/vault.md)
• Human guide, fleet roster, changelog: vault Bots/making-bots.md (create it on first ship). Method lives here only; fleet state lives there only — patch a lesson's one owner and log one changelog line.

How to Run

1. Interview. Refuse to scaffold until job / independence failure / not-list are sharp. See Procedure.
2. Draft a one-screen SOUL (references/soul-craft.md). Stop. Your human signs it.
3. Scaffold (references/process.md). Alias preflight first. --no-skills, pin the brain, file-level skill links, USER.md lockstep sentence if the skill is shared.
4. Kickoff in the child's Bot Chat. Do not babysit its tools. Do not write its MEMORY.md.
5. After certification: vault note + roster row (references/vault.md). Not before.

Quick Reference

Procedure

A. Interview (before any profile create)

Ask, and do not proceed until 1–3 are sharp:

1. One-sentence job. If "and also," split into two bots. Job may be a CLI, an HTTP API, a GUI sock — ComfyUI counts. "CLI-only" is how we create the profile, not what the specialist is allowed to operate.
2. Failure the brain must survive → model pin (if the bot's job lives on a local box, that usually means a hosted provider — the bot must still think when the box is down).
3. What it is not.
4. Does default Hermes need the same skill? → canonical under ~/.hermes/skills/ + file-level symlinks.
5. Who is the client to ping (@hermes, another specialist, nobody).
6. Voice: inherit vs write. Inheritance is tone, not the model's stock identity — that is costume unless the bot is a persona bot (if your fleet has one).

B. SOUL draft

Write one screen. Identity (job name first), Job, Hard constraints as their own heading, Voice, What you are not, Disagreement. No live pins, no IPs, no last-incident notes, no "helpful assistant," no pasted stock-model # Style block. Full rules in references/soul-craft.md.

Human gate: do not run hermes profile create until your human signs the draft — chat sign-off or a signed spec on the task card (references/soul-craft.md §Human gate). Iterate in the conversation or on the card, not on disk.

C. Scaffold

Full mechanics and the command sequence: references/process.md. The stop points:

Alias preflight — mandatory, before any profile create NAME. The default alias wrapper can destroy a real CLI through a ~/.local/bin symlink:

zsh -lc 'which -a NAME'
# and, even if which is empty:
test -e "$HOME/.local/bin/NAME" || test -L "$HOME/.local/bin/NAME"

If either finds anything: --no-alias (rationale and the landmines: references/process.md §--no-skills).

• --no-skills; never --clone / desktop clone. Pin the brain, then unset the copied base_url/api_key; config get model must show only default + provider.
• Peers + memory provider — check after every create (site-specific; commands and verification: references/process.md §Independence). The invariant: every rostered profile has every peer it must reach. Do not print keys.
• Sibling-profile CLI from this profile: always prefix HERMES_HOME=$HOME/.hermes.
• By default, SOUL.md writes prompt your human (security.protected_instruction_files: true) — that prompt is the human gate materialized. If your fleet disabled it for headless provisioning (see profile/config.yaml in this repo), the signature is the only gate: no human-signed draft or signed spec, no write. If a write is blocked anyway, stop — do not sneak it in via the shell.
• Never hand-edit config.yaml — config set only (your human may hand-edit their own; you do not). Never copy credentials. Never print auth.api_key / secret_key.

Then: write signed SOUL.md, thin memories/USER.md — if the skill is shared, include the lockstep sentence: one line stating that the canonical skill lives under ~/.hermes/skills/<category>/<name>/, the profile files are symlinks, and process changes patch the canonical tree (so later sessions do not re-flag the drift). Then empty-or-tiny memories/MEMORY.md (the child fills this). Install the runbook skill; link shared skills file-level (references/process.md §Shared skills). Not every specialist needs a custom skill — @hostadmin is hermes-agent + earned MEMORY. Do not invent a runbook so the folder looks complete.

Stop. Do not fill the child's MEMORY.md. Do not add a vault roster row yet.

D. Certification (child's Bot Chat)

Kickoff: first look at the real box/job → one failure path → client ping if there is a client. The child patches its own skill + MEMORY.md. You may message_agent one job ("first look") and then get out.

Certified when it has done the job against the live system, rewritten the stale bits of its runbook (if it has one), and pinged the client (or you agreed there isn't one). A first look that finds nothing broken is still a first look — do not invent a failure to practice. Your human saying "document it in the vault" is a ship signal. Uncertified profiles do not get a Bots/<name>.md or a roster row unless your human overrides.

E. Vault

Only after D. See references/vault.md.

Failure modes (symptom → owner)

One line each; mechanics live with the owner.

Verification

A new bot is done when:

1. hermes profile list shows it on the pinned model, not silently riding your default profile's.
2. hermes -p NAME config get model is only provider + default.
3. .no-bundled-skills exists in the profile root.
4. (If your fleet has peers) hermes -p NAME peer list shows every peer it must reach — or DMs will ack then vanish.
5. (Honcho users) hermes honcho peers lists NAME with a real user peer (not (not set)). memory.provider is honcho.
6. SOUL.md matches the signed draft (one screen).
7. Shared skills: ls -l on profile SKILL.md shows l (symlink), canonical is a regular file. rglob from the profile skills dir finds SKILL.md.
8. After certification only: vault note + roster row + Home line + making-bots.md changelog.
9. python3 "$HOME/.hermes/skills/autonomous-ai-agents/botmaker/scripts/drift_check.py" exits 0.