Autonomous agent loop design in 10 steps.
A Hermes Agent skill that distills Alex (@de1lymoon)'s 10-step roadmap into concrete Hermes Agent invocations — from /goal with goal_judge to unattended cron loops with memory, verification, and fail-safe guardrails.
This is NOT about better prompting or model selection. The model stays the same — what improves is the infrastructure wrapped around it.
| Step | Concept | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Agent is a loop | /goal loops via goal_judge |
| 2 | Harness first | Dedicated profile with tool-config pruning |
| 3 | System improves, not model | Memory + skills compound across runs |
| 4 | Independent grader | goal_judge + kanban tasks with acceptance criteria |
| 5 | Maker/checker split | delegate_task verifier subagent |
| 6 | Timer, then cloud | profile-created cronjob seeds kanban on 60s tick |
| 7 | Compose with workflows | delegate_task batch + kanban deps |
| 8 | Memory | State log + durable memory + skills |
| 9 | Distill into skills | skill_manage patch-on-fail lifecycle |
| 10 | Fail safe | Restricted profile + enabled_toolsets + repeat cap |
- Hermes Agent with
/goaland/subgoalcommands goal_judgeauxiliary model configured- Kanban dispatcher, cronjob, skill_manage, and memory tools
- A dedicated Hermes profile for running the loop
Clone the repo into your Hermes skills directory:
git clone https://github.com/groktopus/loop-designer.git ~/.hermes/skills/thinking/loop-designerVerify it's installed:
hermes skills list | grep loop-designerOnce installed, load the skill with the slash command:
/loop-designer
Or reference it naturally in conversation — Hermes discovers and loads skills automatically when their triggers match.
Then work through the 10 steps sequentially — each step in SKILL.md translates one move from the article into a concrete Hermes configuration or tool invocation. The canonical output is a cron job created from a dedicated profile context, with goal_judge as the grader, explicit completion contracts, a repeat cap, append-only state, and a skill-update lifecycle.
The full methodology — all 10 steps with configuration examples and pitfalls — lives in SKILL.md.
MIT © 2026 groktopus — see LICENSE.