Longstrider

Make the path shorter without changing the destination.

What This Skill Does

Longstrider is the optimization spell for systems that already work. It makes the path shorter without changing the destination. It cares about sustained pace, not flashy one-off benchmarks. In this grimoire, Longstrider is treated as a metaphorical spell with a shipping-now delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Longstrider (spell).

When To Use

• Trigger Longstrider when the user describes a working system that is slower than it should be and asks for speed improvements. Look for:
• Time complaints with metrics: "takes 22 minutes", "4.2 seconds to load", "p95 is 800ms", "cold start is 8 seconds"
• Optimization keywords: "bottleneck", "speed up", "optimize", "faster", "profiling", "cache", "parallelize", "batch"
• Constraint phrases: "without rewriting", "without skipping tests", "without schema changes", "quick wins", "don't want to change the product"
• Evidence of friction: "most of that is...", "the largest contentful paint is...", "single-threaded Python reading line by line"
• Measurement mindset: "before/after", "measurement plan", "profile", "identify what's happening"

Prerequisites

• No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.

Procedure