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Hermes is the always-on orchestrator whose community pattern is delegation: Hermes plans and coordinates, then hands work to specialist CLIs. Nika slots into exactly that pattern as the deterministic workflow worker — not another coding agent (that’s OpenCode’s seat), but the runner for work that should be repeatable, budgeted and auditable.
Hermes orchestrates · Nika runs the plan with receipts.

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Install the skill (day 1 — no catalog wait)

The Nika delegation skill lives in the public marketplace repo and installs three ways: 
# as a tap (Hermes scans skills/ by default)
hermes skills tap add supernovae-st/nika-agents
hermes skills install nika

# or single-file from the raw URL
hermes skills install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supernovae-st/nika-agents/main/skills/autonomous-ai-agents/nika/SKILL.md

# or via the skills.sh CLI
npx skills add supernovae-st/nika-agents
New skills take effect next session (or --now). The skill teaches the delegation idiom end-to-end: scaffold via terminal(), the check-before-run law, budget caps on paid models, background+poll for long runs, and the receipts loop (nika trace show · nika trace verify). For schema/validation answers without shell round-trips, add the read-only MCP oracle to ~/.hermes/config.yaml, then /reload-mcp: 
mcp_servers:
  nika:
    command: nika
    args: [mcp]
    timeout: 120
Validation and learning only — running workflows stays on the terminal, where the budget flags and traces live (the oracle’s contract).

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Prove the delegation

In a Hermes session:
Use the nika skill: smoke-test my nika install offline, then create hello.nika.yaml from the chain template, check it, and run it with the mock model. Report the trace verify verdict.
Expected: nika --version → nika examples run 01-hello --model mock/echo (offline, zero keys) → nika new --from chain → nika check --json → mock run → nika trace verify exit 0.

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The two clocks

Hermes runs live — its terminal is a pipe, and a long nika run renders quietly until the final card. The skill teaches the fix: launch with background=true, poll with process(action="poll"), then read nika trace show for the run card.

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Cost honesty in delegation

  • Always pass --max-cost-usd on paid cloud models — the floor refusal (exit 2) and the mid-run stop (NIKA-1704, exit 1) are the guardrails.
  • Prefer local models for drafts (ollama/…) — no key, no meter.
  • An uncataloged model meters as $0: never rely on the budget cap for a custom endpoint (cost honesty).