Older desktop builds appended a frozen "## Messaging other agents" section (roster
included) to SOUL.md. Since the server started injecting the live section into Bot Chat
sessions, that copy did two wrong things: every CLI/TUI/messenger session paid ~600 tok
for a bot-only protocol, and in Bot Chat itself the probe went silent when SOUL carried
the heading, so bots saw the stale roster instead of the live one.
- load_soul_md strips the legacy section at read time (covers un-migrated profiles and
the ambient-home edge cases the same way the SOUL isolation fix does)
- bot_mode_probe drops the SOUL-carries-heading suppression; a SOUL-era stored Bot Chat
prompt now counts as legacy and is upgraded once (stamped, so it cannot loop)
- config migration v41 rewrites SOUL.md across the default + every profile once
The Bot Mode mention middleware built message_agent targets from
botHandle(), which prefers a roster row's source-qualified UI alias
("default-vera"). Neither resolver accepts that form — the relay matches
canonical handle/profile (± @connection-id) and the local path a bare
profile name or "hermes" — so remote handoffs died with "No teammate
named" before enqueue.
Annotate the canonical form instead: profile@connection-id for remote
rows, canonical bare handle (default→hermes) for local ones. Pin the
profile@connection form on the relay side too, so the emitted target
stays inside the documented resolver contract (#97678).
Every bot-to-bot DM is a fresh `hermes -p <bot> chat -Q` process, so it
pays agent startup on each hop. Profiling one hop showed the single
largest controllable cost was a live GET /models against the provider on
EVERY launch (0.3-0.6s normally, up to the 15s probe timeout on a slow
endpoint) — the in-memory endpoint-metadata cache is per process and the
Nous persistent context cache is bypassed by design so the portal stays
authoritative.
- model_metadata: memoize successful remote /models probes on disk
(cache/endpoint_model_metadata.json) with the SAME 300s TTL as the
in-memory cache, so authority semantics are unchanged (reconciliation
still lands within 5 minutes) but the answer is shared across
processes. Local endpoints are never memoized (LM Studio reloads).
- bot_relay: the cross-machine reply waiter polls the reply file every
250ms instead of every 2s — up to 2s of dead air on every relayed reply.
Nothing here changes turn ordering: DMs and group rounds stay serial.
Live (polis-hermes bot, spawn -> first API request, cold, 5-6 runs):
main median 1.23s (one 20.8s outlier = probe stall) -> 0.96s, no stalls.
_auth_env fell through to os.environ on a scoped miss, so one profile
could inherit another profile's allowlists and allow-all flags.
bot_relay.waiter_command put connection_id into python -c source. A
quote in the id broke the waiter. A crafted id could run extra Python
in the sender gateway.
Widen the DM tempfile-leak fix (#91902/#92407) to the sibling sites
PR #92784 introduced:
- tools/bot_relay.py: expose the 6h stale sweep as
cleanup_bot_relay_artifacts() (cleanup_*_cache contract) and wire it
into gateway housekeeping — previously it ran only when the Desktop
drained the outbox, so plaintext envelopes/replies queued while the
Desktop was away could sit on disk forever.
- tui_gateway/methods_bot_relay.py: move the payload write inside the
try/finally so a failed write no longer leaks hermes-relay-dm-*.txt.
- tools/bot_mode_dm.py: _spawn_delivery takes dm_file=None for relay
waiter deliveries, which have no plaintext DM tempfile to reclaim.
Connections ARE the peer set: every gateway connected to the Desktop
(local, remote URL, SSH, Hermes Cloud, docker) is now message_agent-
reachable. The Desktop relays over the persistent sockets it already
holds — roster sync per connection, envelope drain/deliver/reply loops —
so cross-connection DMs work exactly like local ones, replies included.
Also fixes the legacy-SOUL gate bug: profiles whose SOUL.md carries the
old plugin-appended protocol silently lost the message_agent tool
because the injection/execution gates keyed on protocol-section
non-emptiness instead of managed-install.
Teknium