Weak open models (mimo, nemotron-class) that see tool-call XML/JSON sitting in
file contents or tool output get primed and emit their own structured tool
calls mimicking the payload — usually with an empty/whitespace name. Those
calls can't be fuzzy-repaired toward a real tool, so the dispatch loop returns
an error and the model retries. Before this fix, every empty-name error dumped
the full tool catalog back to the model, which fed the priming loop more names
to mimic and inflated context 3-4x across the retry budget.
A blank/whitespace-only tool name now gets a terse anti-priming error that
tells the model in-context tool-call syntax is DATA, with no catalog dump. A
genuinely-wrong-but-nonempty name (a real typo) still gets the full catalog so
the model can self-correct.
Not a sandbox/auth boundary issue: Hermes never parses tool-call text from
content into executable calls (structured tool_calls only; the lone text->call
parser is the Copilot ACP transport and it also rejects empty names). The
reporter's own debug dump confirms the injection never executed.
Behavior-contract test added: empty-name -> terse error, no catalog; nonempty
unknown -> catalog preserved. Exercised end-to-end via run_conversation against
an in-process mock provider.
Teknium
020e59d3cf