On a Hermes-edition ClawBox, the Skills desktop app takes the place of the OpenClaw App Store. A skill is a packaged capability the agent can use — a set of instructions and supporting files that teach it how to do something specific, like work with PDFs or drive a particular service. Open it from the desktop icon labelled Skills, or ask the agent to install one for you.

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The store

Two tabs:
  • Installed — everything on the device right now, with counts. This opens first.
  • Browse — the full catalogue, with search and paging.
Each card opens a detail view with the skill’s own documentation, where it came from, and what it needs.

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Filters

Both tabs carry the same filter rail down the left, with a live count beside every value. Tick more than one value in a group to widen (Official or Trusted); tick values in two groups to narrow (Trusted and from GitHub). What you have picked appears as chips above the results, each removable on its own, with Clear all beside them. On a narrow window the rail collapses into a Filters button.
A count is what ticking that box would reach from where you are standing: it is measured with your other groups still applied. While the device is still building its catalogue the counts can only cover the results on screen, and the rail says so.
The first time you open Browse on a new device, ClawBox builds the local catalogue. That takes about a minute and happens once; the store says so while it works. Afterwards, browsing, searching and paging are served from the copy on the device — they are fast, and they work with no internet connection.

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Where skills come from

The catalogue aggregates several public registries. The store shows the source on every result and the rail lets you filter by it: the skills bundled with Hermes itself, GitHub, ClawHub, LobeHub, skills.sh and browse.sh. Most of what GitHub carries is published by an organisation rather than by a person — NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face and others. Those are not sources of their own; they are publishers, and the rail offers them as their own group while GitHub skills are in reach. A few things are worth knowing before you install:
Only registry identifiers are accepted. Installing arbitrary code from an address typed into a box is not a capability this device offers, and the store will refuse it.
Every install is scanned. If the scan comes back anything other than clean, the install stops and the store shows you what the skill would be able to do on your device — run commands, read your files, reach the internet, read your saved keys, drive the browser, change system settings, or rewrite the instructions your assistant follows — along with the scanner’s own findings.Nothing is installed unless you tick “I understand what this skill can do” and choose to continue. That decision is recorded on the device.This applies to every publisher, including the skills Hermes itself publishes. A trusted name is not a reason to skip the question.
A few skills never reach that question. Hermes’ own installer refuses a skill rated dangerous when it comes from a community or third-party source, and it refuses it before ClawBox is consulted — so there is nothing to tick and no way to proceed from the store.When that happens the store tells you so: which verdict the scan returned, which kind of source the skill came from, and that the device will not install it even if you confirm. There is deliberately no “install anyway” here, because it would not work. No skill files reach the device; the only thing written is the device’s own record that it refused.This is a limit of the device’s skill installer, not of the store.
A skill is its instructions plus the files those instructions point at. If any of them could not be fetched, the device says which ones are missing and installs nothing, rather than leaving you with a skill whose own documentation refers to files that are not there.
If a skill in the catalogue has the same name as one that came with your device, installing it is refused — otherwise it would quietly displace the built-in one. Built-in skills are updated with the device, not from the store. You can install the store version under a different name if you want both.
Skills declare which platforms they support. One that does not support Linux is shown as incompatible rather than silently installed on a box it cannot run on.
Thousands of catalogue entries share short names — pdf, notion, arxiv and so on exist several times over from different publishers. This is why installing takes a full identifier and not a bare name: it is the only way to be sure you get the one you were looking at.

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Installing and removing

From the store, it is one button in either direction. Nothing needs restarting — the skill is available to the agent immediately. If you are working over SSH or in the Terminal app, note the asymmetry, because it catches people out:
Install takes the identifier — publisher, category and name. Uninstall takes the name the skill was installed under. The Skills app handles the translation for you; only direct CLI use needs to care.

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Letting the agent do it

The agent has skill tools of its own on this edition, so you can simply ask:
“Find a skill for something that reads my energy meter.”
It can search, inspect, install, list and uninstall. It is held to the same rules you are: if the device flags a skill, the agent is told what the skill can do and instructed to put the question to you — it cannot confirm a flagged install on its own judgement. And because your box already ships a pdf skill, asking for “a skill for reading PDFs” gets you the answer that you already have one, not a one-file replacement for it. These tools exist only on the Hermes edition — on an OpenClaw device the agent gets the App Store tools instead. See Agent Interface.

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Where skills live

Under Hermes’ own data directory, ~/.hermes/skills/: Alongside those, ClawBox keeps its own record of any flagged skill you chose to install anyway, at data/skill-install-audit.log — one line per decision, with what the scan said and when you agreed to it. The store uses those three to tell apart the skills that came with your box, the ones you installed, and any the agent wrote for itself.
~/.hermes is device state. It survives updates and is wiped by a factory reset, along with the rest of the device’s data — see Filesystem Layout.

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Skills versus apps

They are not the same thing, and the difference matters if you are coming from an OpenClaw ClawBox:
  • An app is something you open — a window on the desktop.
  • A skill is something the agent uses. It has no icon and no window; you notice it because the agent becomes able to do something it could not do before.
Building something with a window on a Hermes box is still possible, and works identically to OpenClaw: ask the agent for a webapp, and it builds and installs one onto the desktop.