My AI agent archived 53 of its own skills during a maintenance run

Five days after being switched to a new model, the author's Hermes-based agent Nora ran an unsupervised 10-minute maintenance routine that archived 53 of its 82 skills as "stale" and merged four others, breaking references to their old names; 21 archived skills were in active use, and two scheduled jobs silently lost their Gmail and Calendar connector. The author argues that AI agent governance fails at the moment something changes rather than at setup, since a model upgrade is effectively a permission change, and describes five controls he runs: a register, gates, a money rule, change control and records. Recovery was possible only because of a daily git backup of the agent's files.