Run your first agent template

You need an agent harness: the program that reads the folder and runs the agent. Hermes is the one this site has a setup guide for, and DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor and OpenClaw are five more. The README's quickstart names the one its author used, so read that line first if you are unsure.

If you do not have one yet, Set up a harness installs Hermes and points it at your first pack. What is an agent harness? explains what the program is doing.

Nothing here needs an account, and nothing runs on our side. You download a folder and run it where you already work.

• A folder you are happy for an agent to read, with a copy of the files it needs.
• A model key, if your harness asks for one. API keys and permissions covers which kind to get.
• Ten minutes for the first run. Most of that is reading, not waiting.

Press Download on the template's page. The button points at that version's own file, so a link you keep is a link to the build you meant.

tar -xzf agent-pack-builder.tar.gz
ls agent-pack-builder
  LICENSE  README.md  SOUL.md  config/  skills/

Every pack unpacks to one folder with a README at its root. Keep the folder name as it comes: a renamed folder is the most common reason a quickstart cannot find its own files.

Copy the pack's folders where your harness looks for skills and instructions, then start your harness the way you normally do. In Hermes that is the skills folder inside a profile: ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/skills/. Each of the others documents its own path.

If your harness has no skill folder, the README still tells you what the agent was asked to do. A pack with nowhere to run is still worth reading: it is the shortest description of the job its author was doing.

A good first run is boring, and it ends by telling you what it did not touch. Here is the shape of one, from a template that reads invoices. It is an illustration, not a transcript from your machine.

Read 41 invoices from ./invoices
Matched 38 against a purchase order
3 need a person: INV-2291, INV-2304, INV-2312
Wrote report.md. Nothing in ./invoices was changed.

That last line is the one to look for. An agent that says what it left alone is an agent whose author thought about the failure case.

• It finished, and it said when it finished. A run with no ending is one to stop and read.
• It named the files it touched, or said it touched none.
• The report is shorter than the input, which is the whole reason to run it.
• If it asked you a question, it asked once, not once per file.

Every build carries a one-line change note, and the template's page keeps them all. Read the newest line before you update a copy.

The example above is the shape of a history, not a real one. Yours will name the files that moved.

Three things cover most of a first run that goes nowhere.

• The quickstart was written in the uploader's harness, not yours. Start there, then read the README's list of what it expects.
• You pulled a newer build than the README describes. The build line above the quickstart says what moved.
• The folder was renamed, or sits somewhere your harness does not look. That is the first thing to check, and the cheapest to fix.

If the pack looks wrong rather than old, the uploader's handle is on its page, and a reviewer has already read it once.