On an Anthropic subscription OAuth credential, every request failed with
HTTP 400 "You're out of extra usage. Add more at claude.ai/settings/usage".
That is not a billing condition: Anthropic's server-side content filter rejects
the first sentence of Hermes' own built-in SKILLS_GUIDANCE prompt, and the
rejection is surfaced with a billing-shaped message. Because the message points
at the usage settings page, it reliably sends people to buy quota they do not
need — the reporter lost three debugging sessions to it.
Bisected against the live API with the real 71,721-char assembled prompt: the
first SKILLS_GUIDANCE sentence alone reproduces the 400 and removing it alone
clears it. Size was ruled out (20 KB of unrelated filler returns 200) and so was
the system[0] identity gate (that returns 429, a different failure).
Three changes, all serving the same outcome — a subscription user can no longer
be misdirected by this 400:
- agent/prompt_builder.py: reword the triggering sentence to the phrasing the
reporter verified returns 200. Meaning, the skill_manage reference, and the
## Skill Safety Rule block are all preserved. The reword is empirically
validated rather than understood, so a comment records the bisect and warns
that any rewrite must be re-verified against an OAuth token, not an API key.
- agent/conversation_loop.py: the Anthropic branch of the billing guidance no
longer asserts exhaustion as fact. It hedges the opening line, names the
content-filter alternative, and gives the operator a way to tell the two apart
(if the usage page still shows quota, suspect a content rejection). It also
points at `hermes auth reset anthropic`, because the credential exhaustion
latch replays the stored error for ~60 min without issuing a request — which
makes a real fix look like it did not work.
- hermes_cli/auth.py: document that CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN is an OAuth token,
not an API key, despite auth_type="api_key". It stays in api_key_env_vars
because that tuple doubles as the credential-discovery list; removing it would
stop Hermes finding a `claude setup-token` credential at all.
Docs updated to match the reworded prompt.
Fixes#82154
Jack Lau
6fbbe18be8