Scarf Template Author

A Hermes skill that teaches your agent how to scaffold a new Scarf project — and, because Scarf's .scarftemplate format is symmetric with a live project on disk, how to shape it so you can publish it to the catalog later if you want.

What you get

Installing this template drops a skill at ~/.hermes/skills/templates/awizemann-template-author/scarf-template-author/SKILL.md and a minimal "how to use" project in a folder of your choice. Every agent that reads the standard ~/.hermes/skills/ directory — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, and the rest of the agents.md family — picks the skill up automatically.

How to use it

After install, open your agent in any directory and say something like:

"Create a new Scarf project that watches the number of open PRs in my GitHub repo."
"Scaffold a Scarf dashboard that tracks daily focus time from my Toggl logs."
"Set up a project that runs a cron job to summarise my inbox each morning."
"Help me author a Scarf template I can share."

The agent will ask four or five questions (purpose, data source, cadence, what to display, any secrets) and then write:

<your-dir>/.scarf/dashboard.json
<your-dir>/.scarf/manifest.json — only if you're going to use a configuration form or want to export later
<your-dir>/AGENTS.md
<your-dir>/README.md
Optionally a cron job registered via hermes cron create (always created paused — you enable it from Scarf's Cron sidebar when ready).

When it's done, click + in Scarf's Projects sidebar and pick the directory. Your dashboard appears. Iterate on it by asking your agent to tweak widgets or add fields.

Turning a local project into a shareable template

Once you're happy with the result, Scarf → Projects → Templates → Export "<name>" as Template… produces a .scarftemplate anyone can install. The exporter carries the configuration schema but never your filled-in values — so your secrets and personal settings stay local.

About this template's own dashboard

The installed project itself is tiny — a single Quick Start text widget and an empty list widget meant to serve as a scratchpad for tracking which scaffolded projects you've created. Its only purpose is to give you a place to land after install and a reminder of the trigger phrases above. The real value is the skill.

Reference

Project Templates wiki page — full spec + troubleshooting.
awizemann/site-status-checker — a complete, non-trivial example the skill studies and references.
Dashboard / configuration schemas are Swift-authoritative at scarf/scarf/Core/Models/ProjectDashboard.swift and scarf/scarf/Core/Models/TemplateConfig.swift in the Scarf repo.

What this template intentionally is not

Not an archetype picker. v1 is blank-slate conversational; pre-baked starters (monitor, dev-dashboard, personal-log, etc.) may land in v1.1 once we see what shapes people ask for most often.
Not a graphical wizard. The conversational agent path is strictly richer than a fixed form, and dogfoods Scarf's agent-first philosophy.
Not a remote-scaffolding tool. It writes files into a directory on the machine where the agent runs; pair with Scarf's remote-server mode if you want to scaffold onto another box.

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