Overview
- Zoltar serves as a comprehensive divination tool, featuring Swiss Ephemeris natal charts, live horoscopes, structured tarot readings, I Ching, numerology, and Elder Futhark runes.
- Antiscammer leverages Hermes to inundate scammers on platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord with the entire Shrek screenplay—3,679 lines—until they are compelled to block you.
- Book-Mirror delivers a custom two-column chapter analysis that relates the ideas in a book to your actual life, utilizing your own words, experiences, and individuals from Hermes's memory.
You’ve installed Hermes and made it appear more appealing than ChatGPT. Now you’re curious about how to utilize it effectively.
While many Hermes skills focus on serious applications—like GitHub PR workflows, research processes, and developer automation—there's also room for some fun.
The beauty of AI agents lies in their flexibility; they can be tailored to suit your needs rather than just conforming to the intentions of the AI provider. This adaptability is why some experts believe these agents will usher in a new era of the internet, allowing users to create applications that meet their specific requirements without waiting for developers to publish them on platforms like the Google Play Store.
Here are three entertaining skills that could enhance your experience with Hermes.
#1 — Zoltar: The Genuine Fortune Teller
The name nods to the fortune-telling machine featured in the 1988 movie “Big,” where Tom Hanks makes a wish with unforeseen results.
The Zoltar skill is not just a chatbot masquerading as a mystic; it operates as a fully-fledged divination engine using authentic calculation libraries.
When you request a natal chart, Hermes activates Kerykeion, a Python library based on the Swiss Ephemeris, which has been the standard for professional astrology software for years.
By providing your birth date, time, and place, it generates detailed planetary positions, house placements via the Placidus system, an aspect grid, and flags for retrogrades.
The interpretations are grounded in specific placements rather than generic traits. You might encounter statements like, "with Mars in Aries in the 10th house square Pluto, your intense drive may lead to ongoing conflicts with authority figures."
If you resonate with astrology, you’ll likely understand these insights; if not, you might think, “hey, that sounds just like me!”
That’s merely one of six functionalities.
Daily horoscopes pull real-time data from the Ohmanda API, providing professionally crafted daily readings for each sign.
Tarot readings utilize a structured dataset of 78 cards from the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, available as single draws, three-card Past/Present/Future spreads, or a full 10-position Celtic Cross, with each card explaining its traditional interpretation.
The I Ching feature employs a Python method for coin casting, returning the hexagram by number and name, along with interpretations of the “Judgment” and “Image” texts specific to that hexagram—not generic wisdom about impending change.
Numerology covers the complete Pythagorean system: Life Path, Expression, Soul Urge, Personality, Birthday, and Maturity numbers, all calculated and interpreted from scratch.
Rune casting uses a dataset of all 24 Elder Futhark runes, including the reversed positions, while appropriately noting that eight symmetrical runes like Gebo and Isa cannot be reversed, so those are excluded from the skill’s application of merkstave.
If you seek a comprehensive reading report, Hermes can produce a styled HTML document for you. It’s the kind of output you could present to someone unaware it was AI-generated, and they would likely assume it was professionally done.
Is astrology "real"? That debate predates the internet and is beyond this discussion. What is undeniable is that Zoltar provides accurate readings—every interpretation is based on verifiable sources. The phrase "Moon in Pisces in the 7th House trine Venus" refers to actual planetary placements at your birth, calculated using a legitimate ephemeris. What you choose to do with that information is a philosophical question.
To install, place the SKILL.md file from the Zoltar folder into your ~/.hermes/skills/ directory. Hermes will recognize it in the next session. You can then type something like /zoltar followed by your inquiry, and let the ancient machine respond.
Alternatively, simply ask Hermes to install this skill by providing the GitHub URL. Then you can say, “Use your Zoltar Skill, give me my horoscope, tarot reading, and astral chart. My name is John Doe, born on April 29, 1969, at 6:45 a.m. in Washington DC.”
For maximum effect, pair it with Telegram. Having an AI fortune teller that responds to your voice messages at 11 p.m. could either be the pinnacle of technology in 2026 or its nadir. Perhaps both.
#2 — Antiscammer: A Tale of Scammers
You’re familiar with the messages: "Hi dear, I need assistance recovering my Bitcoin." The inheritance scams. The job offers requiring a small processing fee. The bank alerts with links that definitely don’t lead to your bank.
The usual advice is to ignore, block, and move on. The Antiscammer skill offers a more inventive solution.
This skill utilizes Hermes’s browser control to inundate the scammer’s chat—whether on WhatsApp Web, Telegram Web, or Discord—with the entire script of “Shrek.” Each line is sent one at a time, totaling 3,679 messages.
If “Shrek” isn’t to your liking, the skill also includes the “Bee Movie” script as a more concise alternative at 1,371 lines. Users can also input any custom text they prefer for this purpose.
The rationale is both economic and humorous. Scammers rely on volume; their model necessitates quickly sifting through many targets to find a few who respond. By tying up a scammer's chat for the entire duration of Shrek—roughly 15 to 30 minutes of continuous messages—you’re effectively sabotaging their operation.
Every minute they spend watching lines from "Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me" arriving one by one is a minute they're not scamming someone who might actually fall for it.
Though it may not be the most ethical approach, tech-savvy users have been sharing this meme for some time. Now, with AI embedded, you don’t have to handle the programming yourself.
The skill also features a second option for email scams, generating extremely lengthy, overly formal replies—five pages written in the style of a 19th-century British solicitor, referencing fictitious legal frameworks, requesting numerous forms of documentation, and posing intricate questions about the deceased Nigerian prince's estate that will require considerable time to resolve.
There’s an email style guide included in the skill’s references folder outlining the specific language patterns and structural techniques for maximum time-wasting impact.
For instance, we tested it with an email offering half a million dollars in exchange for a transportation fee for a coffin filled with gold. The skill produced this reply:
ChatGPT translated it as:
A word of caution: Avoid using this skill for sophisticated phishing attempts targeting live accounts or anything involving real credentials. It’s designed for mass-market scams—like inheritance emails, fake bank alerts, and crypto recovery scams that everyone encounters. For such cases, Antiscammer serves as a legitimate countermeasure and can be mildly satisfying to deploy.
Install it in the same manner as Zoltar: copy the SKILL.md from the antiscammer folder into ~/.hermes/skills/ and start a new session. You can directly invoke it with /antiscammer and paste any received message. Hermes will take care of the rest.
#3 — Book-Mirror: A Book That Reflects You
This skill is the most subdued of the three. It lacks theatrical framing or animated film scripts. Instead, it offers a skill that could transform how you approach reading in the future.
The Book-Mirror skill, inspired by a concept from Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Y Combinator, takes any book you provide and creates a two-column analysis for each chapter.
Left column: what the author actually wrote, featuring specific anecdotes, statistics, direct quotes, named frameworks, and precise figures. It’s detailed enough that you could theoretically forgo reading the original book and still grasp its essence.
Right column: how all of that relates to your actual life.
Not just life in general, but your specific life—real people, decisions you’ve made, and patterns that Hermes has gleaned from your conversations. Before the analysis begins, the skill composes a context pack from Hermes’s memory: your name, role, significant relationships by name, recurring emotional patterns, current projects, stressors, and specific quotes from your own expressions. If context is lacking, it prompts targeted questions to fill in the gaps.
The instructions for the right column are intentionally precise: “Mention actual people from their life, reference real dates, situations, and decisions they’ve made. Read like a therapist who knows them, adding notes in the margins.”
It accepts PDFs, EPUBs, URLs, or just a title, in which case Hermes will search Project Gutenberg or Archive.org for a public domain version. The extraction process utilizes PyMuPDF for PDFs and ebooklib for EPUBs, dividing the text by chapter markers and processing each chapter sequentially rather than concurrently. The context builds as it reads—what it learns in Chapter 3 should enhance how it reflects on Chapter 7.
The richer Hermes’s memory of your context, the more insightful the right column becomes. An agent that has been with you for three months understands nuances about your patterns that you might not have explicitly stated but which it has inferred from your discussions. This accumulation is precisely what this skill aims to leverage.
Provide it with a business book you've been delaying, a philosophy text that never resonated, or a novel that captivated you last year for reasons you couldn't articulate. The right column will clarify why it resonated—and likely name the person in your life it pertains to.
It resides in the book-mirror folder. Install it, present a book, and let it do the work. For texts containing more than 20 chapters, be patient—it reads thoroughly, chapter by chapter, rather than skimming.
The Trend
As of this writing, Hermes has garnered over 134,000 GitHub stars. Its skills community, cataloged in repositories like the awesome-hermes-agent repository, spans a range from cybersecurity to Minecraft servers to Pokemon emulation.
While most of these skills serve serious purposes, these three stand out. They may seem quirky at first glance—a fortune teller, an anti-scam tool, a personalized book mirror—but each one addresses a real need that more serious skills do not.
Zoltar encourages a different engagement with information. Antiscammer places a powerful AI in a position where its strengths—patience, consistency, and plausible text generation—are genuinely effective against real-world issues. Book-Mirror bridges the gap between reading content and applying it to your life.
The community around Hermes is rapidly evolving—the agent achieved 100,000 GitHub stars within its first 10 weeks, according to the documentation for awesome-hermes-agent. At this rate, if agentic AI is indeed the next phase of the AI revolution, we can expect to see many more skills like these on the horizon.
These three skills are currently available in the jaldps/hermes-skills repository, free for installation, and ready for the next scammer who dares to message you or the next date interested in testing your fortune-telling skills.