The idle tip rotation walked the catalog as a ring: after the last tip it
wrapped to the first, so a user who had already seen every tip kept
getting "Start fresh", "Teach it once", ... again every six hours for as
long as they used the app. Only the X stopped a tip, and letting a bubble
time out (the normal way it leaves) counted for nothing.
The walk is now one lap. nextTip also steps over every tip in the seen
ledger ($tipShownAt, which already recorded every catalog tip that
reached the screen), so a tip shows once however it left, and the
rotation runs dry once every tip has had its moment. Settings > Reset
clears the seen ledger and the cursor as well as the retired set, and its
button counts what a Reset would actually bring back (shown or closed,
counted once). Agent tips carry no catalog id and are untouched.
Live repro (Playwright against the worktree's Vite renderer, all nine
tips seeded as seen, clock fast-forwarded past settle + cooldown):
origin/main re-showed "Start fresh"; fixed renderer shows nothing;
a fresh user (nothing seen) still gets the first tip.
Run models locally as a first-class provider. The CLI grows a managed
llama.cpp runtime (engine install, model download, server supervision);
the desktop app grows the full setup and management story on top of it.
GUI surfaces ship behind the desktop --local launch flag (hermes desktop
--local, or the flag on the packaged app); backend routes and the CLI
are always live.
Runtime (hermes_cli/local_runtime/):
- curated GGUF catalog with per-machine variant selection: hardware
probe (VRAM/RAM/UMA), fit planning with spill accounting, quant choice
by context window
- derived recommendation: quality-ranked picks gated by a predicted
decode-speed floor, bandwidth-aware on unified memory; the decision
table is pinned as a test (pick AND reason per memory class), and the
Recommended badge explains its pick in a tooltip fed by the resolver's
actual branch
- engine install + model download with resumable split parts, cumulative
plan-level progress, and staged-model integrity (a split GGUF counts
only when every part is present)
- server supervision: spawn/adopt/stop, router mode with per-model load
progress relayed over SSE, abandoned-request cleanup
Desktop:
- Settings -> Providers -> Local models: one-click quickstart (install
engine, download the recommended model, boot) plus per-model download/
activate/eject, fit-ranked catalog with context pills
- model pickers (composer dropdown + Cmd+K) show staged local models,
in-flight downloads as live progress rows, and load-into-memory bars
- local-setup campaign tip for eligible hardware; System resources
statusbar widget (GPU/VRAM/RAM); in-chat load progress during sends
- friendly dead-server errors, and failed agent builds retry on the next
send instead of wedging the session
Co-developed with NVIDIA field feedback on RTX 5090 and DGX Spark.
Tours had no switch at all, and the tips switch only covered the app's
own rotation — so "I don't want these" was answerable for half of one
feature and none of the other. Both are now a row in Settings →
Appearance, on by default, and off means off for Hermes as well: an
agent tip is dropped at the bridge and a tour request is refused in
words, so the agent hears that the walkthrough didn't run instead of
narrating a spotlight nobody can see.
Renames $tipRotationEnabled to $tipsEnabled to match what it now
governs. The storage key keeps the old name on purpose — renaming it
would read as unset for anyone who had already turned tips off, and
silently turning them back on is the one outcome worth avoiding.
The switches stop at the app's edge for now: the tools are still in the
model's schema and the calls simply don't land. Withdrawing them
entirely needs the setting to reach the backend, which is the next PR.
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.
An ambient rotation that points at parts of the app you may not have found yet
— one accent bubble, an arrow, and an outline around the subject. No scrim and
no spotlight: a tip is a pointer beside your work, not a modal in front of it,
so it takes no focus, owns no Esc, and blocks nothing.
It only speaks when the app is genuinely quiet — nothing streaming, no dialog,
menu or tour up, window focused, a few seconds since the last keystroke — and
walks the catalog in order rather than shuffling, so tips arrive as a tour of
neighbouring parts of the app instead of unrelated ones. A tip with nothing on
screen to point at is skipped, not waited for.
Closing one with its ✕ retires it for good. That is the whole reason the ✕ is a
heavier gesture than letting the bubble time out, and Settings → Appearance is
the only way back — alongside the switch that turns the feature off entirely.
emozilla