Skills, Cron, and Profiles from the GUI

The Skills Panel

The Skills panel in the Desktop app brings the Skills Hub into a graphical interface. Instead of running hermes skills search and hermes skills install from the terminal, you browse and install skills through the same UI you use for everything else.

The panel displays your locally installed skills at the top -- the ones currently available to the agent in your active profile. Below that, a search field lets you browse the Hub's registry of skills, currently containing hundreds of community and officially curated options across categories like development, writing, research, productivity, and agent orchestration.

Each skill entry in the search results shows the skill's name, a one-line description, its category and tags, and a trust tier (builtin, trusted, community, or agent-created). This information maps directly to the SKILL.md spec and the security model covered in T42. Skills marked trusted have been vetted; community skills have passed security scanning but are not curated. The trust tier is visible from the Desktop before you install.

Installing a skill from the Desktop triggers the same process as hermes skills install from the CLI: fetch, quarantine, security scan, install. A progress indicator shows where the skill is in the process. If the security scan flags an issue, the installation is blocked with an explanation -- the same Skills Guard protection available from the CLI.

Managing Installed Skills

Installed skills appear in the top section of the Skills panel with their current status: active, inactive, or archived. You can activate or deactivate skills from the panel with a toggle -- deactivated skills remain installed but are not loaded into agent sessions. This is useful for skills you use occasionally but not constantly; they stay available without adding to the context overhead of every session.

Clicking on an installed skill shows its details: the full description, the procedure it defines, any prerequisites or configuration it requires, and when it was installed or last updated. You can also view the raw SKILL.md content from the detail view, which is useful for understanding exactly what an installed skill does before using it.

The Hub integration in the Desktop includes an update check: a button that checks whether any installed skills have newer versions available and shows what changed in each update. Updating a skill from the Desktop applies the same fetch/scan/install process as initial installation, ensuring updated skills are checked for safety.

The Cron Panel

Hermes supports scheduled jobs -- tasks that run automatically at specified times, driven by cron syntax. The Cron panel in the Desktop provides a GUI view of all scheduled jobs for the current profile.

Each job in the panel shows: the schedule (in human-readable form alongside the cron syntax), the prompt or command the job will execute, the next scheduled run time, and the status of the last run (success, failure, or never run).

You can create new cron jobs from the panel using a form that includes a cron expression input with live validation (showing you the next several scheduled run times as you type), a prompt field for what the agent should do when the job fires, and options for session behavior (new session each run, or continue an existing session).

Managing jobs -- pausing, resuming, deleting -- is also available from the panel without touching the CLI. For users who set up recurring tasks like daily reports, weekly summaries, or periodic file processing, the Cron panel makes it easy to audit what is scheduled and make adjustments without remembering cron syntax.

Profiles

Profiles are isolated Hermes environments. Each profile has its own configuration, skills, session history, and memory. Switching profiles changes all of these simultaneously. You can have a development profile configured with coding-focused models and skills, a writing profile with different models and writing-focused skills, and a personal profile with yet another set of tools and preferences -- all within a single Hermes installation.

The Profiles panel in the Desktop shows all available profiles and lets you switch between them. Creating a new profile initializes it with the same defaults as a fresh Hermes installation. You then configure it independently -- adding providers, selecting a model, installing skills -- without affecting any other profile.

Profile names appear in the top-left of the Desktop window, so you always know which profile is active. The current profile's configuration, session list, and skills are what you see in every other panel. Switching profiles updates everything simultaneously.

Cross-Profile Session Links

As covered in the session management lesson, cross-profile @session links let you reference conversations from one profile within a session in another. The Profiles panel assists with this by showing the session IDs of recent sessions in each profile, making it easy to find the ID you want to reference without switching profiles or searching through session history.

This is particularly useful in the Desktop because the visual workflow makes cross-profile referencing practical. In the CLI, cross-profile references require knowing session IDs from memory or running a search command. In the Desktop, you can browse to the profile, find the relevant session, copy its ID, switch back to your active profile, and paste the reference into your prompt -- all within the same app.

Profile Isolation in Practice

Profile isolation is more complete than it might appear. Skills installed in one profile are not available in another. Memory stored in one profile's sessions does not surface in another. API keys are shared (they live in the global .env file, not per-profile), but model selection and provider routing are per-profile via each profile's own config.yaml.

This means you can experiment with new skills, aggressive model configurations, or different tool settings in a dedicated profile without risking your primary workflow. If an experiment goes badly, delete the profile and the mess is contained. Your primary profile is untouched.