Hermes rewrites its own morning-news SKILL.md to v1.3.0

The morning-news skill was built in an earlier installment and hand-rewritten in full using nano, then left untouched from June 17, 2026. In the meantime the cron job itself changed: on October 7 a continuity setting was added so the job sees its previous output and avoids repeating what it already delivered. The skill's steps never mentioned that, so the instructions and the actual job had drifted apart.

The agent resolved the drift on its own terms. Given a Telegram request, it updated the skill to v1.3.0, adding a step to check the previous delivery first, a rule against re-posting the same topic even if the wording or outlet differs, a rule that follow-ups need important new information within the last 24 hours, and a rule to publish only confirmed items on days with fewer than five new topics. A diff against the backup confirmed all six reported changes, plus additions like not asserting beyond what was verified and preferring any specified format or template. The rewrite also removed the description of how to choose between Firecrawl, Tavily and web_extract.

One manual run of the delivery went out and produced three items, matching the new format for acquisition status. The write-up is careful not to call this an improvement, since a single run cannot show that. Reversal was tested not on the daily skill but on a test skill, plain-japanese-v2, where one patch was rolled back and the pre-rollback state was captured separately, leaving the original patch line intact.