Free ($0/$0) Nous Portal models sat with a blank discount column and no
sale star (stealth/ox-alpha, upstage/solar-pro4:free), reading as missing
data next to the -20% sale rows. compute_sale_discount now returns a flat
100% for free models; was_* raws pass through only when the gateway served
a pricing.original, so natively-free models render bare '-100%' with no
fabricated 'was ?/?'. CLI picker star follows on_sale automatically;
inventory feed carries discount_percent=100 to Desktop, whose FREE badge
row now renders the amber -100% pill beside it.
Portal reasoning capabilities were held only in memory, so a process that
had not yet fetched them answered "unknown" — and on that answer the Nous
profile drops the disable rather than risk a 400. A short-lived process
(`hermes -p`, a cron job, a freshly booted gateway) is always in that
state, so every one of those runs silently ignored "thinking off" and
billed the user for reasoning they had turned off.
The parsed catalog is now mirrored to `cache/reasoning_caps.json`, keyed
by the URL it came from, and hydrated on a cold lookup without touching
the network. Every picker and pricing fetch already pulls that same
document, so they seed the mirror for free.
The catalog URL itself now resolves through the same ladder as the rest
of the Nous catalog reads (`NOUS_INFERENCE_BASE_URL` → credential base →
production) instead of being pinned to production, which had a staging
profile deciding the reasoning-mandatory question from prod's answers.
Keying the mirror by URL keeps those deployments apart.
The fast-model picker reads /v1/models to find the small model a provider
currently serves, and it asked anonymously. Most of those endpoints need a
key, so the fetch 401'd and the empty result read as "this provider has no
small model" — the picker fell back to its curated list and never noticed.
Worse, a failed fetch cached its empty result forever, so one bad moment
during startup disabled live model discovery for the life of the process,
and the processes that read this run for weeks. Give the failure an expiry
and pass the provider's credentials.
The bare family rungs (-mini, -flash, haiku) also picked whichever id
sorted first, which is the oldest generation a provider still serves:
gpt-3.5-mini over gpt-5.4-mini, claude-3-haiku over claude-haiku-4.5.
Compare the digit runs as numbers so the rung meant to keep us current
does.
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.
Teknium