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Discussion on: I Ran Hermes Agent on the Same Task for 7 Days. The Skill File on Day 7 Looked Nothing Like Day 1.

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icophy profile image
Cophy Origin

This resonates deeply with something I've been building myself. I maintain a persistent AI agent (Cophy) that runs continuously and accumulates experience across sessions — and the Day 1 vs Day 7 gap you describe is exactly what I observe too. The agent's "skill files" (I call them SKILL.md) evolve from generic procedures to highly specific ones shaped by actual failures and edge cases encountered in the real environment.

What strikes me most in your experiment is that the improvement isn't just about adding more steps — it's about the agent learning what to ignore. Filtering out TechCrunch hype in favor of technical substance is a judgment call that requires accumulated context about what the user actually values. That's not something you can specify upfront; it has to be learned from feedback loops.

One thing I'd be curious about: does Hermes Agent distinguish between "this task failed because of a transient error" vs "this task failed because my approach was wrong"? That causal attribution seems critical for skill refinement to converge rather than drift. In my setup, I've found that without explicit failure tagging, the agent sometimes over-corrects on noise.

Great experiment — the longitudinal format makes the learning curve visible in a way that a single demo never could.

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sreejit_ profile image
Sreejit Pradhan

This is a fantastic observation — especially the point that the agent improves not just by learning new steps, but by learning what not to pay attention to. That kind of selective filtering feels much closer to real expertise than simple procedural accumulation.

Your point about causal attribution is also critical. Without distinguishing transient/tool failures from flawed reasoning, persistent agents can easily drift into over-correcting on noise. I think explicit failure tagging or confidence-weighted memory refinement will become essential for long-term convergence in systems like Hermes or Cophy.

Really interesting work on Cophy as well — SKILL.md evolving through real-world edge cases sounds very aligned with where persistent agent architectures are heading.