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 a category filter and counts. This opens first.
  • Browse — the full catalogue, with search, source filters and paging.
Each card opens a detail view with the skill’s own documentation, where it came from, and what it needs.
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 lets you filter by it — among them the skills bundled with Hermes itself, GitHub, ClawHub, LobeHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face. 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.
A skill whose install-time scan does not come back clean is not installed. The store does not offer an override for it.
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 reading PDFs and install it.”
It can search, inspect, install, list and uninstall. 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/: 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.