inner-life

Use when the agent should keep a sense of itself across sessions — logging what happens, writing an evening journal, or thinking freely at night. Keeps dated state that carries forward and colors how the agent works the next day.

Overview

An agent accumulates a great deal in a day and keeps almost none of it. Facts survive, procedures survive — but how things have been going does not. Every morning starts the same way regardless of whether yesterday was a good day or a rough one.

This skill adds three things: state, a running record of dated facts about how things are going; an evening journal that turns the day into a written entry; and dreams, free thinking during the quiet hours. Tomorrow is reached through a short summary written into native memory, which Hermes injects into the system prompt of every session. There are no scores anywhere in this — how long ago something happened carries the meaning that a number would only obscure.

When to Use

• The evening run is due — write the day's entry and refresh the summary
• The night run is due — think about something that isn't a task
• Something happened worth recording: a conversation, a failure, a thing that caught attention
• The user asks for the journal, a weekly rollup, or what's been going on

Don't use for: storing facts or procedures. Hermes has memory for durable facts and skill_manage for reusable workflows, and its background review already maintains both. This skill does not duplicate either.

Three modes

Mode	When	Read
Logging	something happened	references/state.md
Evening	once a day	references/journal.md
Night	quiet hours	references/dreams.md

Read only the reference for the mode at hand. All three are never needed at once.

First run

If inner-life/state.md does not exist:

1. Copy templates/state.md to inner-life/state.md in the working directory.
2. Create inner-life/journal/ and inner-life/dreams/.

Nothing else is needed — there is no configuration and no setup script.

What this is not

Not a memory system: Hermes already has one, and this skill deliberately stays out of it.

Not mood tracking. There are no levels, percentages, or bars here on purpose. A date already says everything a rating would claim to say, it cannot drift out of sync with reality, and it requires nobody to be trusted with keeping it accurate.

Common Pitfalls

1. Writing the journal and skipping the memory summary. The journal never enters a future session's context. Only the summary does. Skip it and tomorrow notices nothing.
2. Recording judgments instead of facts. getting frustrated with deploys is useless in a month; third failed deploy, same missing env var is not.
3. Dreaming without checking the last two weeks. The same preoccupation comes back in new words, and the record loses its value.
4. Filling native memory with prose. The limit is about 2,200 characters; long text there displaces something that mattered more.
5. Writing to satisfy the schedule. An empty day deserves one honest line, and an empty night deserves no file at all.

Verification Checklist

• inner-life/state.md exists and its entries are dated
• Today's journal entry exists, or the day was deliberately left blank
• The native memory summary reflects recent dates, not last month's situation
• Stale state entries have been pruned, and anything still open remains in Waiting