So far I've only been running openclaw agents and had a steep learning curve. "self-improvement" became a very attractive term on this journey. So I took a dive into Hermes Agent, the self-improving agent runtime from Nous Research. One of the first things I wanted to understand was a risk: what actually happens when you install a community skill? Skills are code and instructions that the agent will execute, and Hermes pulls them from an open ecosystem. So I read the install path in the source - instead of blindly trusting the docs.
What I found is better than I expected in one way and structurally limited in another.
What Hermes already has on board
Hermes does not install external skills blindly. Every externally-sourced skill goes through a real gate before it lands on disk. In hermes_cli/skills_hub.py, the install flow is: fetch → quarantine → scan → policy decision → install or block-and-audit. The scan lives in tools/skills_guard.py and runs regex-based static analysis for known-bad patterns: secret exfiltration (curl interpolating $API_KEY/$TOKEN/$SECRET), reads of credential stores (~/.ssh, ~/.aws, ~/.gnupg, ~/.kube, and Hermes's own ~/.hermes/.env), destructive commands, persistence, and obfuscation. If the scan blocks an install, the quarantined copy is deleted and the event is written to an audit log.
