Normalize malformed memory config during initialization and bind per-target write permissions to the session MemoryStore so direct and staged writes cannot update a disabled built-in store.
The in-app browser was a one-way mirror. open_preview put a page in the pane
and read_preview read its text back, but nothing could touch it. A click meant
falling back to the browser_* tools, which drive a separate Chromium the user
cannot see — so "log into this and pull my invoices" happened in a different
browser from the one on screen, with none of the sessions the user is already
signed into.
Four pieces, and they only make sense together:
· an in-page engine that inventories what is interactable and performs the
verb, injected as source because it has to run inside the guest page;
· the preview.act.request bridge from the gateway into the pane;
· drive_preview, for acting: elements, click, type, scroll, press, and the
pane's own back/forward/reload;
· annotate_preview, for marking without acting.
Those last two started as one tool doing two unrelated jobs. Leaving a mark is
not an action — it outlives the turn that drew it — so it gets its own verb,
and the interaction verb gets a name that says what it does.
Gating is the existing surface rule: desktop_ui folds in on session
source: 'desktop', and the bridge refuses to act for a background session, so a
turn running behind the user's back cannot reach into the page they are working
in.
Two details worth a reviewer's attention. Typing assigns through the
prototype's value setter, because React shadows value with its own accessor and
ignores an input event whose value it believes it already wrote — a plain
el.value = … types into a field that snaps back on the next render. And
clicking replays the pointer/mouse pair before activation, because frameworks
bind to mousedown as often as to click.
Salvage follow-up for #72283: instead of a second pre-retry clamp block
(which bypassed the #55546 clamp+compress path and broke its three
regression tests), parse the output cap ONCE at classification time and:
- exempt parseable wrapped output-cap 429s from the eager rate-limit
provider fallback (a deterministic request-shape failure that failover
cannot fix but the clamp fixes in one retry), and
- widen is_context_length_error so they reach the SAME #55546
clamp+compress recovery as plain output-cap 400s.
Adds both #72283 regression scenarios plus an ordering guard proving a
NON-EMPTY fallback chain does not consume the wrapped 429 (fallback
slot unspent, model unchanged). 119 fallback/rate-limit tests green.
With memory_enabled: false but user_profile_enabled: true, the memory tool
stays (it backs USER.md) but the full MEMORY_GUIDANCE told the model to save
notes to a MEMORY.md store that does not exist. Split the guidance: a
profile-only block is injected for that configuration, directing writes to
target='user' only.
Walks the real resolution chain -- config.yaml on a temp HERMES_HOME ->
check_memory_requirements -> get_tool_definitions -- rather than mocking
the availability check, since the bug was in how the flags reach the
schema. Covers both flags off, either one alone, no config file at all,
and a config read that raises (must fail open).
Also asserts the external provider's tools survive with the built-in tool
gone, so the fix cannot regress into taking Hindsight/Mem0 down with it,
while disabled_toolsets keeps its documented "hide everything" meaning.
The existing MEMORY_GUIDANCE test built a skip_memory agent whose flags
were both false, so it was asserting the old tool-presence-only behavior;
it now states its precondition and gains the false-case mirror.
Un-fences OPENAI_MODEL_EXECUTION_GUIDANCE from the gpt/codex/grok substring
check and gives it its own injection gate, independent of
tool_use_enforcement, controlled by config.yaml `agent.execution_guidance`
(auto/true/false/list — same semantics as tool_use_enforcement). The "auto"
list (EXECUTION_GUIDANCE_MODELS) now also covers deepseek, kimi, qwen, glm,
minimax, mimo, and mistral.
Composio agentic-eval traces showed Hermes+DeepSeek/Kimi failing where
competitors passed: financial math done in prose, no read-back after
external writes, malformed identifiers "repaired", completeness claimed
despite count mismatches. The discipline block existed but those models
never received it.
The block is extended with compact clauses distilled from that analysis:
- external-write read-back (tool-call success is not task success; internal
file edits already confirmed by the tool are not re-verified)
- count reconciliation (declared totals/has_more are hard assertions)
- literal preservation (never normalize identifiers that fail a stated
format; lookup success does not validate a malformed token)
- retry-differently (empty/partial/suspiciously narrow results get a
broader retry before concluding)
- completion gated on verification (done = every named acceptance
criterion verified, never a plausible subset)
The todo tool description now encourages enumeration-as-checklist for
"all N items" tasks and gates completed status on verified work, never
intent.
Guidance is chosen once at session start keyed on model name, so the
system prompt stays byte-stable for the life of a conversation.
Supersedes/absorbs prior contributor proposals: #20588, #35087, #41874
(MiMo), #53847 (GLM tool-calls-as-text stall).
Co-authored-by: Mat-London <56627804+Mat-London@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: intelac <8803887+intelac@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: 6ylqq <51219463+6ylqq@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: tauros1983 <267660491+tauros1983@users.noreply.github.com>
Ten behavior tests for target discovery, stable-selector ordering, step
paging, recovery hints, and the self-containment contract the preview
injection depends on. Docs cover data-tour markup and the curated-tour
entry point alongside the tool itself.
Per project policy, .env / HERMES_* env vars are reserved for
credentials; behavioural settings belong in config.yaml. Replaces
HERMES_DETERMINISTIC_EMPTY_GUARD and
HERMES_EMPTY_RETRY_COST_THRESHOLD_USD with an additive
agent.empty_response_guard section:
agent:
empty_response_guard:
enabled: true # false = legacy fixed 3-retry behaviour
cost_threshold_usd: 0.25 # per-attempt cost that halves the budget
- hermes_cli/config_defaults.py: new documented subsection under agent
(additive key, no config-version bump needed).
- agent/empty_response_guard.py: resolve_guard_settings() maps the
section to (enabled, threshold) with fail-open tolerance for
malformed values; guard_enabled()/_cost_threshold_usd() now read the
init-resolved agent attributes instead of os.environ.
- agent/agent_init.py: resolves the section once at init into
agent._empty_guard_enabled / agent._empty_guard_cost_threshold_usd,
following the existing tool_use_enforcement extraction pattern.
- Tests updated to config-attr injection; new TestResolveGuardSettings
covering malformed sections, YAML string booleans, bad thresholds,
and a DEFAULT_CONFIG sync check; new integration test proving
enabled:false restores the legacy 1+3-call behaviour.
Requested by isak-ialogics on PR #75115.
Every empty-response retry re-sends the full conversation input at full
price. On large contexts a single turn that produces no visible output
could bill the user several dollars across the 3-retry + fallback-chain
walk (reported: ~$2.33 for one empty answer on a ~26K-token session).
Signaled refusals (finish_reason=content_filter, Anthropic refusal
stop_reason, guardrail interventions) are already terminal today and
never reach this loop. The uncovered class is *unsignaled* refusals:
the provider returns 200 with zero output tokens and a generic finish
reason. Those are deterministic — resending the identical prompt
reproduces the same empty — so burning the remaining retry budget only
multiplies the charge.
New agent/empty_response_guard.py, two independent guards, both failing
OPEN to today's behaviour:
- Deterministic-empty detection: two consecutive empty attempts with
usage present, output_tokens == 0 (reasoning tokens count as output),
and identical (model, provider, finish_reason) skip the remaining
retries and go straight to the fallback chain — a different model may
well answer. Missing usage, nonzero output, or any signature change
keeps the full budget.
- Cost-aware retry budget: when one attempt's estimated input cost
exceeds HERMES_EMPTY_RETRY_COST_THRESHOLD_USD (default $0.25), the
empty-retry budget drops 3 -> 1 for that streak. Unknown pricing or
included/subscription routes are untouched.
At exhaustion the status trace now includes the estimated cost of the
empty attempts so the charge is at least explained in-session.
Streak state lives on the agent and self-clears whenever
_empty_content_retries resets to 0, transparently honouring every
existing reset site (turn start, tool success, compaction, fallback
activation) without touching them.
Set HERMES_DETERMINISTIC_EMPTY_GUARD=0 to disable both guards.
Tests: tests/agent/test_empty_response_guard.py (26 unit tests) plus
two loop-level integration tests in tests/run_agent/test_run_agent.py
proving the api_call reduction and the fail-open path.
Refs NS-503.
The "Conversation started:" line carried a bare date (%A, %B %d, %Y). Tools
that accept instants -- nutrition, calendar and similar MCP servers -- reject
naive datetimes and require an explicit UTC offset, so the model had to infer
EST vs EDT from the date alone. Near a DST boundary that is a coin flip, and a
wrong guess does not error: it silently writes the record onto the wrong day.
Append the IANA zone (when configured), the zone abbreviation and the UTC
offset, e.g.:
Conversation started: Saturday, August 15, 2026 (America/New_York, EDT, UTC-04:00)
get_timezone() returns None when no timezone is configured; in that case the
line falls back to the abbreviation and offset of the server-local (still
tz-aware) time, so behaviour is unchanged for users who never set one:
Conversation started: Saturday, August 15, 2026 (EDT, UTC-04:00)
Daily byte-stability is preserved -- the property the date-only format exists
to protect (PR #20451). Zone name, abbreviation and offset are all constant for
the whole day; they shift only at a DST transition, where a change is correct.
The static-prefix reconstruction guard in _restore_plugin_sections matches on
"\n\nConversation started:" and is unaffected by a suffix after the date.
test_datetime_is_date_only_not_minute_precision used `re.search(r":\d{2}")`
over the whole line as a proxy for "no time-of-day". A UTC offset also matches
that pattern, so the check now applies to the date portion (everything before
the zone parenthetical) and the invariant is tightened rather than relaxed:
- test_datetime_includes_utc_offset asserts the offset is present
- test_datetime_line_is_stable_across_rebuilds asserts two rebuilds in the
same day produce a byte-identical line
Fixes#87403
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Follow-up to the #28953 salvage:
- Extract _resolve_block_from_details() so resolve_pre_tool_block and
_dispatch_pre_tool_call_hooks share ONE fail-closed approval-gate
implementation. This also gives the new dispatcher the observability
context wrapping around request_tool_approval that the original PR's
inlined copy lacked.
- Update sibling tests that patched resolve_pre_tool_block at the three
migrated dispatch sites to patch _dispatch_pre_tool_call_hooks with the
(block_message, modified_args) tuple contract.
Verified: 448 targeted tests green; E2E with a real shell hook in an
isolated HERMES_HOME rewrote a live write_file call (path + content)
through handle_function_call, with block and negative paths intact.
The toolset inventory and the post-hook ownership contract both
enumerate the GUI tools; the new tool joins both lists (and the
emit-once parametrization actually exercises its executor path).
Move the legacy ghost-row filter from inside the api_messages loop to
BEFORE repair_message_sequence_with_cursor. Dropping a ghost assistant
row between two user messages creates user→user which the repair can
now fix (previously the repair ran first and missed it).
Promote '[This response was interrupted by a user correction.]' to
module-level _INTERRUPT_SCAFFOLD_MARKER constant — used in both
_apply_active_turn_redirect (checkpoint_parts) and the ghost filter,
so they can never drift.
Update ghost-row test: the two consecutive user messages are now
merged by repair, so check for content as substring.
Sessions already poisoned by the incomplete #73146 else branch still replay
hidden assistant rows whose content is the raw interrupt scaffold. Skip those
rows when building provider messages so old state.db history cannot keep
seeding the echo loop.
The incomplete #73146 else branch still wrote the interrupt checkpoint into
the placeholder assistant row. Mid-tool steers then replayed that scaffold as
the model's own prior reply, which it echoed into a self-replicating ghost
loop. Carry the scaffold only on the user correction's api_content, matching
the assistant-tail branch.
The desktop_ui and post-hook ownership contract tests enumerate their tool
sets exactly — add read_window_below to both (plus the executor-path
parametrize case). Lint: sorted type import, explicit GetWindowsModule type
instead of an import() annotation, curly + blank-line style.
Locks in two gaps left by 015a114a2 (#80623): a mixed response where one
tool call completes validly while a sibling has zero argument bytes still
gets discarded whole via the shared partial-stream-stub path, and the
zero-byte trigger now has an end-to-end test through run_conversation's
retry loop, not just at the chat_completion_helpers unit level.
* feat(agent): read_preview — the desktop-gated tool that reads the in-app browser
The agent could open the preview pane (open_preview) and read the embedded
terminal (read_terminal), but the browser it had just opened was a black box —
'what does this page say?' had no answer. read_preview mirrors read_terminal
end to end: HERMES_DESKTOP-gated via check_fn (zero schema footprint outside
the GUI), dispatched through the same agent callback pattern, windowed with
start/count so a long page pages instead of flooding context.
* feat(gateway): preview.read blocking bridge
Same lifecycle as terminal.read: the tool blocks on preview.read.request, the
renderer answers preview.read.respond (allow_expired — a slow page extraction
losing the 45s race must not surface a raw 4009), and a timeout emits
preview.read.expire so late answers resolve quietly.
* feat(desktop): the renderer serializes the active preview tab for the agent
preview-reader.ts is the preview analog of the terminal's buffer registry: the
URL pane registers a page reader (webview executeJavaScript → title + visible
innerText) keyed by tab id; readActivePreview resolves the ACTIVE tab, windows
the text (24k cap per read), and answers file/artifact tabs with identity plus
a note pointing at the tool that reads that content directly. The gateway
event handler answers preview.read.request beside terminal.read.request.
Three fakes pin mark_exhausted_and_rotate's signature explicitly and broke on
the new argument. They now assert it rather than just tolerate it — the xAI
spending-limit case is exactly the billing-403 this fixes, so it should be
pinning `failure_reason == "billing"`.
The output-cap retry loop reduced max_tokens by 64 tokens per attempt but
never called _compress_context(), so the compressor never fired. Input
growth (~65 tokens/attempt) canceled the savings, leaving the session
stuck at 200,001 tokens — 1 over the 200,000 ceiling.
The fix adds compression to the output-cap retry path. The compressor
drops the middle window, freeing ~50% of tokens. If compression makes
>=5% savings, the session continues; otherwise vision payloads are
stripped or the session ends with compression_exhausted=True.
Also adds CHANGELOG.md entry and bug fix report.
The flush now goes through append_messages_batch; MagicMock-based
assertions and barrier fakes that hooked append_message observed
nothing (the flush's try/except swallowed the AttributeError). Assert
on the batch payload instead.
The retry loop gates on real time.time() < sleep_end; with sleep mocked
to a no-op the test hot-spun 7.5 wall-clock seconds. Advance a fake
clock by each sleep amount instead (pattern precedent:
test_session_activity_persist.py).
Empty content retries previously fired back-to-back with no delay,
wasting up to 3 rapid API calls, and could not be cancelled mid-wait.
Apply the same jittered_backoff() already used for rate-limit and
API-error retries, sleeping in small increments so a user interrupt
aborts the wait instead of blocking until it elapses.
Fixes#35230
strip_think_blocks passed the same response-scrubbing strings through
re's pattern dispatcher on every response. Skills Guard repeated the
same work for 121 patterns against every scanned line.
Compile the existing expressions once and reuse Pattern.sub/search. Keep
each generic tool-call tag in its own paired expression so mismatched
openers retain their payload while existing stray-closer cleanup remains
unchanged.
Part of #33208
Salvaged from #32713 by @ErnestHysa.
Co-authored-by: ErnestHysa <takis312@hotmail.com>
Setting prompt_caching.cache_ttl to a falsy value (false, null, off,
disabled, no, none) now fully disables prompt caching instead of
being silently ignored.
The disable propagates through anthropic_prompt_cache_policy() (early
return when _cache_disabled flag is set) and restore_primary_runtime()
(override after snapshot restore), so it survives /model switches and
fallback re-derivation — the gap that caused #56105 to be reverted in
#56126.
Salvage of #33555 by @BB-light, with model-switch/fallback survival
gap fixed on top.
Co-authored-by: BB-light <BB-light@users.noreply.github.com>
Main's 243c9182b1/a16fd675df/7142dc4580 added load_config_readonly
sibling stubs across 38 files; our pruned versions of 11 of those files
kept only the load_config stubs. Re-applied the pairing at every
surviving site (26 patch()/setattr sites) — same return_value/
side_effect as the adjacent load_config stub. 494 tests green across
the 11 files.
agent_init's config reads now go through load_config_readonly(); 8
tests that stubbed only load_config stopped intercepting them. Each of
the 10 patch sites gains a sibling readonly patch with the same
return_value. 461/461 file-local tests green.
The 1.0s sleep between sequential tool calls has been present since the
initial commit with no documented rationale. It sleeps between local
tool executions — the next LLM request goes out only after the whole
batch — so it rate-limits nothing, and the parallel read-only path
already runs with no delay. Every multi-tool turn pays (N-1) seconds
of dead time. Remove the sleep, the internal tool_delay plumbing, and
dead test assignments. AIAgent.__init__ keeps tool_delay as a
deprecated no-op keyword for one release so existing programmatic
callers construct cleanly; passing it emits a DeprecationWarning.
Second, deeper pass over tools/gateway/hermes_cli plus first pass over
the trees wave 1 missed (acp, acp_adapter, skills, computer_use, docker,
dashboard, conformance, monitoring, secret_sources, hermes_state,
providers). Same rubric as wave 1 (AGENTS.md test policy); security,
alternation/caching invariants, issue-number regressions, and E2E kept.
Real test-quality fixes found and rooted out along the way:
- tests/tools/test_command_guards.py made real auxiliary-LLM HTTPS calls
(DEFAULT_CONFIG smart-approval leaked in) — pinned approval
mode=manual via autouse fixture: 17.4s → 0.4s.
- test_model_switch_custom_providers.py / test_user_providers_model_switch.py
silently probed live provider catalogs (~2s/test) — stubbed
cached_provider_model_ids/provider_model_ids/fetch_api_models.
- test_telegram_noise_filter.py: 15-platform copy-paste matrix over
shared gateway.run logic → 3 representative platforms (55s → 3.9s).
- test_gateway_shutdown.py: stop()'s 5s interrupt-deadline loop spun on
MagicMock agents — interrupt.side_effect now clears _running_agents
(22s → 1.0s).
- test_gateway_inactivity_timeout.py poll-harness timings shrunk 3-5x
(24s → 1.1s); test_mcp_stability.py backoff/SIGTERM-grace sleeps
patched (15.4s → 2.5s); test_async_delegation.py negative-drain wait
5s → 0.5s.
- test_telegram_init_deadline.py: loop-block margin restored to 1.0s
with rationale comment — the watchdog-dump assertion needs the loop
blocked well past deadline+grace under parallel load (flaked once in
the 40-worker verification run at a 0.2s margin).
Verification: full hermetic suite via scripts/run_tests.sh —
2,438 files, 21,718 tests passed, 0 failed, 293.9s wall.
Suite totals vs original baseline: 46,820 → 19,757 test functions
(−57.8%), wall 583.5s → 293.9s (−50%), subprocess CPU 13,564s → 11,623s.
The concept 'never send a turn that strict wire validation rejects as
empty' was forked across four sites, each with its own predicate and its
own blind spots:
1. build_assistant_message write-time ' ' pad — broke codex commentary
turns (content:'' is a designed state), and a DB-side pad can't
survive _rows_to_conversation's whitespace strip anyway. REMOVED.
2. conversation_loop send-time ' ' pad — main-loop only (summary path
uncovered), ordering-fragile (had to run after whitespace
normalization), assistant-only. REMOVED.
3. stream-stub '[response interrupted]' substitution — defeated the
loop's empty-stub guard (the stub no longer looked empty, entered
history, and the placeholder leaked into the stitched final
response via truncated_response_parts). REMOVED.
4. repair_empty_non_final_messages in sanitize_api_messages — the
unconditional pre-send chokepoint shared by the main loop AND the
summary path, covers user and assistant turns, non-final only,
copy-on-write. This is now the SINGLE OWNER.
The owner's payload predicate (_msg_has_payload) is extended to treat
codex_message_items / codex_reasoning_items as payload, so
designed-empty codex commentary turns are never rewritten on any
api_mode — the failure shape that broke site 1 in CI is encoded in the
owner, not special-cased at a call site.
Tests updated to pin the new contracts: builder stores textless turns
as-is; the empty stream stub stays recognizably empty for the loop
guard; poisoned resumed histories are repaired to the placeholder at
the send boundary; codex item carriers are never rewritten.
Sabotage-verified: unwiring the owner fails 3 regression tests.
kshitijk4poor