hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix Profile cloning duplicates large GStack skill payload into every profile

Bug Description

Creating or syncing Hermes profiles can duplicate the full GStack skill tree into each profile under:

~/.hermes/profiles/<profile>/skills/gstack

On my devbox, each copy was about 1.3G because GStack includes node_modules, binaries, and browser-related payloads. With 8 profiles this consumed roughly 9G of disk.

Expected Behavior

Profiles should not get full physical copies of large shared skill payloads when the content is identical.

Reasonable alternatives:

• preserve symlinks when cloning skills
• symlink known heavy shared skills like GStack to the default install
• add a shared skill payload mechanism
• avoid copying node_modules / generated payloads into profile-local skills

Actual Behavior

Each profile received its own full copy of:

~/.hermes/skills/gstack

under:

~/.hermes/profiles/<profile>/skills/gstack

This caused significant disk bloat on a small devbox.

Environment

• Repo: NousResearch/hermes-agent
• OS: Ubuntu devbox
• Hermes profiles: multiple named profiles
• GStack version observed: 1.26.3.0
• Approximate impact: 8 profile copies x ~1.3G each, about 9G reclaimed after deduping

Local Mitigation Used

I replaced profile-local skills/gstack directories with symlinks to:

~/.hermes/skills/gstack

After confirming versions matched.

I also patched local profile creation to dedupe profile-local GStack copies after clone/bootstrap.

Suggested Fix

In profile creation / clone paths, avoid physical copies for large shared skill payloads. At minimum, preserve symlinks or special-case GStack when the default-profile copy exists and versions match.