Off should mean the model is never told the tool exists. A switch that
only made the call fail leaves Hermes offering walkthroughs it cannot
give and promising to point at things it cannot point at, which reads as
a broken agent rather than a respected preference.
Both gate on the switch through a shared desktop_ui.user_enabled helper,
which is the reactions check_fn generalized — same config read, same
reason it has to be config rather than an env var: the switch belongs to
the session's client, and the client may be on another machine.
A non-admin '/sessions all' or '/resume --all' silently downgraded to
chat-scoped listing with zero feedback, which reads as 'my session
vanished' (community Telegram report). Both surfaces now append a notice
that cross-chat listing requires a configured admin. Follows up the
salvaged current-session '(current)' marker (PR #68556, fixes#68547):
sibling tests updated to pin the new contract, new i18n key
gateway.resume.all_requires_admin added to all 17 locales, docs updated.
Builds on webtecnica's escape-aware _split_key_path (#84152, cherry-picked
with authorship preserved; earliest fix in the family was RelaxJonh's #80253
greedy-match approach — both behaviors now ship together):
- _greedy_literal_match: when navigating an EXISTING mapping, prefer an
existing literal key equal to the dot-join of the next N path segments
(longest match wins). Dotted model IDs are the norm, so the common
unescaped command (config set providers.p.models.grok-4.6.supports_vision
true) now hits the real key across set/get/unset instead of creating a
phantom sibling. Plain dotted paths with no dotted-key collision split
exactly as before.
- _phantom_sibling + ValueError in _set_nested: refuse to CREATE a new
intermediate mapping that would shadow an existing dotted literal sibling
(Soju06's fail-loudly suggestion on #84064); set_config_value surfaces it
as a clean CLI error with the escaped spelling to use.
- utils.py::atomic_roundtrip_yaml_update (the second split site, #91607 —
/model + TUI persistence) now uses the same escape-aware split + greedy
literal matching.
- CFG-04 empty-segment guard now splits escape-aware so escaped keys are
not misclassified.
- Tests for every repro shape in the family: #84064 provider model keys,
#80006 Matrix room IDs, #91095 dotted models under custom_providers list
index (incl. escaped creation-when-absent), #91607 model_overrides via
atomic_roundtrip_yaml_update, #99124 dotted leaf keys; plus
backward-compat coverage. Also fixed the carrier's one stale assertion
(structured-value coercion landed on main after #84152 branched) and
removed its dead _MCP_SECRETS_CONFIG fixture flagged in review.
- Docs: 'Dots inside key names' section in website/docs/reference/cli-commands.md.
Fixes#84064, fixes#80006, fixes#91095, fixes#91607, fixes#99124
Salvaged from PR #84199 by @RickyYii. DirectAlias gains api_key/key_env; the direct-alias override re-resolves credentials against the alias endpoint (host-gated, #28660) and reuses the pre-alias key only on an origin match; oneshot -m <alias> passes the alias key as explicit_api_key; direct-alias branch gains the OLLAMA_API_KEY host gate. Fixes#83612.
Widens the salvaged cron doctor with the highest-value fleet check:
an active job whose next_run_at is parked >15min in the past is not
firing (dead ticker, downed gateway, wedged fire-claim). Also registers
doctor in the docs (cron guide + CLI reference) and resolves the salvage
onto current main alongside runs/incidents/notepad.
- Tavily plugin deleted (plugins/web/tavily), keyless endpoints and
ring entry removed from keyless_mcp, legacy backend set / credential
ladder / preference walks / rescue key map scrubbed.
- TAVILY_API_KEY deregistered across config, setup, status, dump, and
nous_subscription surfaces. The tvly- redaction pattern stays --
legacy keys in user envs still deserve masking.
- Sibling test pins migrated (keenable/exa stand in where tavily was
the fixture vendor); tavily test suite deleted.
- Docs updated: web-search, configuration, integrations,
environment-variables, tools-reference, web-dashboard, provider
plugin dev guide.
Live-verified from an isolated HERMES_HOME with all web creds blanked:
zero-config resolution lands in the 4-vendor ring, live keyless ring
search succeeds, no tavily anywhere in resolution order.
Follow-ups on top of #98964's cherry-pick:
- PHOTON_READ_RECEIPTS env toggle (default true) so users can keep
messages at Delivered; declared in plugin.yaml optional_env
- adapter drops both 'read' and 'read_receipt' content types (alias
coverage from #91759 by @mooserini) + regression test
- docs: photon.md feature note + environment-variables.md row
* refactor(skills): shipped-set slim — 15 skills to optional, github six-way merge, pdf absorbs OCR+nano-pdf, channel-gated teams pipeline
Maintainer-directed shipped-skills curation (skills index 1,900 -> ~1,400
tok/call on desktop; every session pays the index, so this is a per-call
diet on all installs):
- optional-skills moves (installable via skills hub, history preserved):
creative comfyui/ascii-art/excalidraw/pretext/sketch/touchdesigner-mcp;
ALL of mlops (huggingface-hub, llama-cpp, serving-llms-vllm,
weights-and-biases, evaluating-llms-harness — subcategory structure
kept); research-paper-writing (55 supporting files, 17.3K-tok load);
openhue; blogwatcher (first taught the cronjob monitor-field watch
pattern + web_extract instead of pre-cron manual workflows)
- DELETED session-librarian (Aug-12 'inspired by Perplexity Computer'
port, never maintainer-intended; session_search covers discovery)
- github: six skills (auth, issues, pr-workflow, issue-to-pr,
code-review, repo-management) merged into ONE software-development/
github skill — routing body + complete per-workflow references;
benbarclay authorship credited; codebase-inspection rides along;
discipline pins from test_github_issue_to_pr_skill.py preserved
against the reference body in the new test_github_skill.py
- pdf absorbs ocr-and-documents + nano-pdf as references/ + scripts
(extract_pymupdf, extract_marker converted to the argparse house
standard its contract test enforces)
- NEW session_platforms frontmatter gate (metadata.hermes): hides a
skill from the index on gateway channels it is not for; fail-open on
unknown platform; teams-meeting-pipeline gated to [teams, cron]
- blocked-page-recovery: research -> new web category; trigger-first
description ('Use when a fetch fails: 403/429, paywall, WAF, bot
wall.') so the model actually reaches for it on blocked fetches
- docs regenerated via generate-skill-docs.py (195 pages); related_skills
swept repo-wide; tests: 1672 passed (2 openclaw failures pre-existing
on clean main, Windows-local)
* chore: ignore .skills_prompt_snapshot.json (local index cache, accidentally committed)
platforms field added, description under the 60-char hardline, dangling
premium-webapp-ui related_skills ref dropped (user-profile skill, not in
the repo tree). Docs page + catalog row regenerated to match.
hermes skills install impeccable (and the docs-page install button) now
installs the impeccable frontend-design skill as an official optional-skills
entry. The local optional-skills/creative/impeccable/ dir is a catalog STUB:
its frontmatter declares metadata.hermes.upstream (repo + path), and
OptionalSkillSource.fetch() pulls the real 163-file bundle live from
pbakaus/impeccable:.hermes/skills/impeccable — the Hermes-native bundle
upstream maintains and verifies. Nothing vendored, never stale.
New mechanism (generic, not impeccable-specific):
- OptionalSkillSource._upstream_pointer(): parses/validates the upstream
pointer (owner/name repo, clean relative path, traversal rejected).
- _fetch_from_upstream(): delegates to GitHubSource.fetch(), relabels the
bundle official/<rel> at trust 'trusted' (curated endorsement, but
third-party content — dangerous scan verdicts still block).
- The live-repo fallback path redirects stubs the same way, so stale local
checkouts behave identically.
Three real gaps this surfaced, all fixed:
- GitHubSource.fetch() only downloaded SKILL.md plus paths linked from a
canonical support dir (references/, scripts/, ...). Impeccable keeps its
playbooks under reference/ (singular) and links scripts only from
reference files, so fetch shipped 1 of 163 files. fetch() now downloads
the full skill directory via the git tree (same approach as the
optional-skills live fetch), still rejecting symlinks/hidden/unsafe paths
and still failing on a missing SKILL.md-linked references/ path.
- The five env_exfil_* scanner patterns flagged loopback requests as
critical exfiltration: impeccable's live mode polls
http://localhost:PORT/status?token=TOKEN and scored two CRITICALs.
Scheme-anchored loopback exemption added; evil.com/?u=localhost decoys
still fire (10-case regex matrix in tests).
- unified_search() truncated to limit before ranking, so official catalog
entries got crowded out by skills.sh mirrors and bare-name installs
stalled on an ambiguity table. Results now stable-sort by trust rank
before the cut, and _resolve_short_name prefers a sole official exact
match over community mirrors.
Also fixes pre-existing test pollution: TestInstallPathSafety's fixture
monkeypatched the PEP 562 dynamic SKILLS_DIR, permanently shadowing dynamic
resolution and breaking the served_repo E2E tests in any combined run
(reproducible on main).
Validation: live E2E do_install("impeccable") against real GitHub —
resolves to official/creative/impeccable, verdict SAFE, 163 files on disk,
skill loads, /impeccable slash command registers. 128/128 targeted tests;
full-dir fetch test sabotage-verified. Docs: optional-skills catalog row,
generated skill page, sidebar.
The bundled plan skill's auto-generated slash command fell off the capped
Telegram/Discord command menus for most installs (skills are the only tier
trimmed at the platform caps, alphabetically — 'plan' sat past the cutoff at
index 57 of 82 bundled skills). Converting it to a first-class CommandDef
gives it a guaranteed core-tier menu slot on every platform.
- agent/plan_prompt.py: build_plan_prompt() — plan-mode rules + authoring
craft distilled from the retired skill; prompt-injection pattern like
/learn and /init (no engine, no model-tool footprint, cache-safe).
- CLI: _handle_plan_command mixin handler (pending-input injection).
- Gateway: /plan branch rewrites event.text and falls through (role
alternation preserved).
- TUI: command.dispatch branch ('plan' was already in
_PENDING_INPUT_COMMANDS).
- Removed skills/software-development/plan/ + docs pages (EN + zh-Hans),
catalog rows, sidebar entry, related_skills references.
- PROTECTED_BUILTIN_SKILLS is now empty (mechanism kept); dependent
curator/usage tests moved to monkeypatched sentinels.
Salvages #67292 by @webtecnica (credit: first /plan command submission,
issue #67264); reworked from inline planning prompt to the prompt-injection
pattern with workspace-saved plans. Closes#67264, closes#36821 (empty
/plan infers task from conversation context).
The grant_existing_profile key was removed in PR #98057; sweep the mode
table, opt-in section, runtime-lifecycle notes, config example, and CLI
reference that still documented it.
Sweeper review, all three points:
- Placement: no new plugins/model-providers/ directory. The Token Plan
profiles register from the existing alibaba plugin module — one module
per vendor, matching how the kimi module carries both of its endpoint
variants. Token Plan is the same vendor/service (Model Studio), same
OpenAI-compatible protocol, its own key + endpoints; splitting to a
standalone repo remains a 5-minute change if maintainers prefer.
- Runtime coverage: TestRuntimeAlibabaRegionalAndTokenPlan exercises
resolve_runtime_provider() for all four variants — provider, api_key,
api_mode, base_url — alongside the existing zai/minimax/kilocode
runtime regressions.
- Docs: providers.md, environment-variables.md, cli-commands.md updated
with the bundled variants and their env keys/base-url overrides.
/bg (formerly /background, which is retired) keeps the existing semantics:
spawn a fresh, independent agent session in the background.
/btw is now its own command matching the convention other harnesses use:
ask a quick side question ABOUT the current conversation without
interrupting it. A one-shot auxiliary LLM call (main model by default,
overridable via auxiliary.side_question.* in config.yaml) answers from a
read-only transcript snapshot — the live session's history, role
alternation, and prompt cache are untouched, and the current turn keeps
running.
Surfaces wired: CLI (inline mid-run dispatch), gateway (all messengers,
busy-dispatch table + idle dispatch, i18n across all 17 locales), TUI
(prompt.btw RPC + btw.complete event), Discord native slash, relay
command manifest, desktop exec routing, docs (EN + zh-Hans).
The todo tool now supports hierarchical task lists: an item's optional
'parent' field points at another item's id, making it a subtask.
- tools/todo_tool.py: parent validated (self-ref dropped), dangling refs
and cycles sanitized; merge mode can set/clear parent; post-compression
injection renders the tree indented and keeps a finished parent visible
while any descendant is still active; the in-progress reorder pass is
skipped for nested lists (a flat move would tear subtasks from parents).
- Schema cost: ~45 tokens added to the cached tool schema (one string
property + one behavior sentence).
- acp_adapter/tools.py: todo result markdown indents by parent depth.
- Desktop: TodoItem carries parent; todoTree() DFS helper; composer
status stack renders subtask rows indented (depth-capped), stabilizer
compares depth.
- Docs: tools-reference todo entry mentions nesting.
Hydration/replay paths (gateway fresh-agent, API-server history) work
unchanged: parent rides inside the same todos array.
Reverts the plan-interrogation rename from #97831 per maintainer decision —
the skill keeps its original grill-me name. The content upgrade (design-tree
frontier-rounds interview mechanic from mattpocock/skills' grilling) stays.
Docs page, catalog row, and sidebar entry renamed back.
Ports the MIT-licensed 'to-questionnaire' skill from mattpocock/skills as
decision-questionnaire (optional-skills/productivity). Interviews the user
about the send only (recipient + needed outcomes), then drafts a
most-important-first discovery questionnaire with answer stubs to
decision-questionnaire-<slug>.md. Includes staging tests for frontmatter
standards, template sections, and de-upstreaming.
Ports the MIT-licensed 'wizard' skill from mattpocock/skills as
setup-wizard-generator (optional-skills/devops). Generates an interactive
bash wizard that walks a human through manual procedures: opens dashboard
URLs, captures values (hidden entry for secrets), writes .env / GitHub
secrets idempotently, and confirms each stage. Vendors upstream's
template.sh library verbatim (bash -n verified) plus a staging test suite
covering frontmatter, template integrity, and de-upstreaming.
Renames the optional grill-me skill to the more descriptive plan-interrogation
and upgrades it with the design-tree frontier-rounds mechanic from
mattpocock/skills' MIT-licensed 'grilling' skill: batch all currently-askable
questions per round in dependency order, agent finds facts itself, decisions
stay with the user. Docs page, catalog row, and sidebar entry renamed.
Per the 'when in doubt, optional' rule — plan-interview is an
on-request capability, not a weekly daily-driver for most users.
Install via: hermes skills install official/software-development/grill-me
On a real TTY, `hermes chat -q "…"` (and `--tui -q`) now starts a normal
interactive session with the prompt submitted literally as the first turn —
no slash-command routing, no '!' shell dispatch, no $(...) interpolation,
no file-drop rewriting — matching how other coding agents handle seeded
launches (Omarchy prompted agent terminals, basecamp/omarchy#8705).
Legacy answer-and-exit is preserved everywhere automation depends on it:
- new `hermes chat --oneshot` flag (distinct dest from top-level -z)
- -Q/--quiet machine-readable contract
- any non-TTY stdio (kanban workers, cron, pipes, A2A)
- top-level `hermes -z` unchanged
CLI: seeded prompt rides a _SeededQueryMessage sentinel through
process_loop, which skips the slash/!/file-drop dispatchers for that one
message. TUI: STARTUP_QUERY submits via a new literal path (submitLiteral)
that bypasses dispatchSubmission and the input.detect_drop rewrite.
Made opt-in when it fired a tip 45 seconds into a launch and another
every six minutes, which is a cadence that owes you a choice. The pacing
has since become a settling delay of five to ten minutes per launch and
a six-hour cooldown persisted across them — roughly a tip a day, weeks
to walk the catalog. At that weight the switch has nothing left to
protect anyone from, and a discovery feature nobody meets is one nobody
has. The switch stays for whoever still wants it off.
A first tip 45 seconds in and one every six minutes after walks the
whole catalog in an hour, which is the cadence of a notification rather
than a nicety. Games get this right by being almost absent: a tip while
you settle in, then nothing for the rest of the day.
Two clocks now have to agree. A per-launch settling delay of five to ten
minutes means opening the app is never met with a bubble, and a six-hour
cooldown persisted across launches means quitting and reopening isn't a
way to farm them — the old schedule lived in the effect and re-armed on
every mount. Flipping the switch on skips the settling delay and offers
immediately, since that clock guards a launch you came into with a
purpose, not a deliberate opt-in.
An agent tip starts the cooldown too: whoever just pointed at something,
the user has had their one interruption for a while.
The two halves of tips were behind one switch, which meant the app
volunteering commentary at idle shipped on by default. Split them along
the line that matters: the rotation talks unprompted, so it now waits to
be asked for, while an agent tip stays ungated like the tour it mirrors
— Hermes raises one mid-conversation, in answer to something the user
said.
Drops the tool's config gate along with the config key it read. The
renderer mirrored that key with config.set, which has no branch for it
and answered "unknown config key" into a swallowed catch, so the opt-out
never reached the backend in the first place.
The quiet sibling of `tour`, in the same `desktop_ui` toolset and reading the
same `tour(action='targets')` discovery call: one bubble with an arrow, for a
sentence that would be clearer with a finger on the thing it's about. Dimming
the whole app to say "the model name is a button" is the wrong weight.
Fire-and-forget rather than a round-trip, because a tip is not a question and
blocking the turn on one would stall the reply it belongs to. The renderer
enforces the user's opt-out itself, so a stale config read can never put a
bubble on a screen that asked for none.
Per the 'when in doubt, optional' rule — site publishing is an
on-request capability, not a weekly daily-driver for most users.
Joins cloudflare-temporary-deploy/page-agent under
optional-skills/web-development (existing category, existing
DESCRIPTION.md kept; the new bundled category dir is dropped).
Install via: hermes skills install official/web-development/publish-site
Salvage adjustments to PR #94392 per review:
- Narrow the supervisor claim to the systemd-VERIFIED path only. The fresh
recovery child now probes 'systemctl --user is-active' after each relaunch;
only an observed-active systemd unit is reported 'verified'. A relaunch that
merely exited 0 is labelled 'relaunch_attempted', never counts as supervisor
coverage, and never clears gateway_fleet_restart_incomplete.
- Serve-owned runtimes (serve/dashboard entries from the spawn ledger, per the
update_inventory serve collector) are no longer silently skipped: the
recovery pass records them (and manual gateways) as skipped-with-reason in
the recovery result and the persisted update receipt.
- Receipt fresh_recovery persists the conservative vocabulary
(requested/verified/relaunch_attempted/failed/skipped); 'succeeded' is gone.
- Added an end-to-end test that drives the real recovery module in a genuinely
fresh interpreter (sitecustomize shim intercepts the grandchild
'gateway restart' and systemctl probes).
web_extract stopped using an auxiliary LLM long ago (deterministic
truncate-and-store), but browser snapshots still routed oversized
accessibility trees through the auxiliary web_extract model, keeping a
dead-looking aux slot alive across every config/picker surface.
- tools/browser_tool.py: remove _extract_relevant_content and
_get_extraction_model; oversized snapshots always truncate at line
boundaries, store the full tree to cache/web, and append a read_file
pointer (element refs beyond the cut live in the file)
- tools/browser_camofox.py: same — no LLM path
- Remove auxiliary.web_extract slot: config_defaults (removal note, same
pattern as session_search/PR #27590), cli.py defaults + env bridge,
gateway/run.py bridged keys, hermes config display, hermes model picker,
dashboard REST slots, desktop + web AUX_TASKS, i18n labels (en/zh/
zh-hant/ja/ar)
- Docs: env-vars, configuration, fallback-providers, browser + zh-Hans
mirrors (web-search zh-Hans was stale on the old LLM pipeline — synced
to truncate-and-store truth)
- Tests updated: aux bridge uses approval slot, browser tests assert the
LLM path is gone and stored files are secret-redacted
A held port made 'hermes serve' print only uvicorn's bare
'ERROR: [Errno 98/10048] error while attempting to bind on address'
and exit 1 — indistinguishable from a broken backend for the desktop
spawn and wrapping scripts.
- Preflight bind probe (matching uvicorn's SO_REUSEADDR bind flags)
before uvicorn.Server; on conflict print machine-readable
'BACKEND_PORT_IN_USE port=<port>' + a human hint naming likely
holders, exit 75 (EX_TEMPFAIL — existing repo convention, see
gateway/restart.py, kanban_db.py).
- Probe-to-bind race covered: SystemExit(1) from uvicorn's own bind
failure is re-checked and translated on both POSIX and Windows
runner paths.
- --port 0 (ephemeral) short-circuits the probe: unchanged behavior.
- HERMES_BACKEND_READY contract untouched.
- Tests: real held-socket repro (sentinel + exit 75, sabotage-proven
to fail as bare exit 1 without the fix), free-port boot regression,
ephemeral-port regression, probe/classification units.
- Docs: port-conflict paragraph under 'hermes serve' in
reference/cli-commands.md.
/review takes the last 10 chat messages plus optional instructions,
spawns a full-privilege background subagent (the async delegation
rail) that investigates the referenced work (PR, code, docs), and its
complete review re-enters the spawning session as a normal
async-delegation completion the primary agent can act on.
- agent/review_engine.py: shared engine (snapshot, briefing,
auxiliary.review credential resolution, dispatch, note formatting)
- tools/delegate_tool.py: internal credentials_cfg per-call override
(never model-facing) resolved through the same credential system as
delegation.provider pins
- auxiliary.review config block (provider/model/base_url/api_key/
api_mode); provider auto + empty model = inherit the main model
- Surfaces: CLI process_command, gateway run.py dispatch +
slash_commands handler (binds the approval session key so the
completion routes back), TUI/Desktop live dispatch in
tui_gateway/server.py, CommandDef registry (+Slack /hermes-only cap)
- Docs: delegation.md section + slash-commands.md (both tables)
- Tests: 15 engine tests (sabotage-verified: credentials_cfg and
dispatch tests fail without the fix), 4 gateway handler tests
through the real async rail
`hermes backup` already skips `backups/` so a full zip never re-ships
earlier pre-update zips. `state-snapshots/` (written by `hermes backup
--quick`, `/snapshot create`, and the pre-update safety net) has the same
shape — every retained snapshot holds its own copy of state.db — but was
not in `_EXCLUDED_DIRS`, so a full backup shipped the DB once per
retained snapshot on top of the live one.
Two places hit this in practice:
- `hermes update` in `full` mode takes the quick snapshot *before* the
full zip, so the pre-update zip always nests the snapshot it just made
(state.db twice in every pre-update-*.zip).
- Any recurring `hermes backup --quick` (default keep=20) makes a daily
`hermes backup` grow by roughly one compressed state.db per retained
snapshot; a 750 MB state.db with two snapshots on disk pushed a daily
zip from 1.8 GB to 2.3 GB.
Add `_QUICK_SNAPSHOTS_DIR` to `_EXCLUDED_DIRS` (moving the constant up
next to the exclusion rules so there is one source of truth). Both walk
sites and `_should_exclude` share the set, so `hermes backup`, the
pre-update zip and the auto-backup path all pick it up. Restoring
snapshots after a machine move was never the point of the full backup —
`profiles.py` already excludes `state-snapshots/` from `--clone-all` for
the same reason.
Tests: unit case next to the `backups/` one, plus two end-to-end cases
that use the real `create_quick_snapshot` producer and assert the zip
carries exactly one state.db (full backup and pre-update-order).
