Why a Brand-New Skill Returns Zero Results in a Search
Unfiltered skill search is answered from a periodically rebuilt central index, so a skill published minutes ago can be missing even though it exists. Changes from September 16-18 close the gap: an index miss now re-queries skills.sh, ClawHub, LobeHub and well-known endpoints within an 8-second budget, and the index build no longer silently drops skills when a shard times out.
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Commanding Your Agent From a Train: A Field Guide to the Community WebUI
Hermes WebUI is a community project with roughly 18K stars that puts the CLI's capabilities in a browser: Python plus vanilla JS, no build step, bound to localhost by default, with SSH tunnels or Tailscale for phone access and optional password, passkey, or OIDC sign-in. Here is how to install it, expose it safely, and where its edges are.
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Why Opening a Dropdown Costs You Three Seconds
A spinner in the model picker, a `hermes plugins list` that hangs, a Profiles panel that drops frames — three unrelated-looking stalls with one cause: the read path was quietly doing network probes and filesystem walks. PRs #114994, #114811 and #114879 moved the caching, the failure memory and the refreshes off that path.
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Hermes No Longer Fetches Whatever URL Someone Handed It
Image URLs returned by a generation provider, reference images a model supplies, pet-store manifests and spritesheets, skills.sh sitemap entries — none of these URLs come from you. PR #114887 routes seven fetch sites through the repository's existing SSRF guard: check before the fetch, re-check at TCP connect (closing the DNS-rebinding window), re-check every redirect hop, and fail closed on a 3xx with no Location header.
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The API Key You Printed Once Should Not End Up in a Chat Log
Two fixes landed the same day to close two seams in secret leakage: PR #114839 makes dotted sk- keys and Zhipu's prefix-less id.secret keys fully masked in tool output, and PR #114789 forces redaction on every cron delivery lane — chat, session mirror, job name, bot chat — failing closed instead of shipping the raw text.
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Your Memory Provider Moved Out of Core — the Upgrade Puts It Back
Built-in memory providers are moving to their maintainers' repos and the plugin catalog. PR #114569 adds two hooks: hermes update and agent init both notice a configured provider whose code is gone and reinstall it at the catalog's reviewed pin. Name, memory.<name> config, data directory and tool names all stay the same.
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1,393 Subagents, 19 Hours, One Desktop: How Nous Refactored a Million Lines with Hermes
One /goal, 19 hours and 1,393 subagents cut 34.4% of the source lines out of Hermes' own repo. Here are the official measurements, the nine things that break at scale, and the steps to repeat it in your own codebase.
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One 16 KB Script Froze a Gateway for 23 Seconds: The Command-Scan Postmortem
Hand Hermes a few-hundred-line heredoc and your Telegram bot stops answering — a synchronous regex is holding the event loop. Issue #113535 and PR #114208 explain the O(n³) path and why the fixed version reaches identical verdicts.
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Stop Letting Images Eat Your Quota: The Two Vision Knobs Worth Knowing
Natively embedded images are re-sent on every later API call, and the old retire policy could rewrite 120,000 tokens of history just to drop one image. PRs #113953 and #113817 fixed both and added vision.embed_target_bytes and max_calls_per_image.
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The Second Model You Never Configured: Hermes' Auxiliary Call Lane
Session titles that turn into JSON fragments, approvals that stop being smart, agonising compression with a local model — the fault is often not your main model but one of 13 named auxiliary tasks. Here is the config shape, the global knobs, and the silent-failure fixes merged on 17 September.
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Your Agent Can Byte-Wreck a Live SQLite Database — Now Hermes Refuses the Write
write_file and patch used to read a .db-wal sidecar as ordinary text and write the mojibake back, silently destroying a live SQLite database. PR #114220 adds a sidecar write guard at the tool layer. Here is how the damage happened, what changed, and whether your version has it.
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hermes doctor's Large-WAL Warning Is Now Honest
hermes doctor used to tell you to run --fix on a >50 MB state.db WAL without checking for a live writer. PR #113055 makes that warning honest.
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Why Hermes Honcho Memory Lands in the Wrong Project
Auto-generated titles overrode sessionStrategy, and memory resolution used the backend launch directory instead of your workspace — PR #112602 fixes both.
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Your renamed Hermes profile left a ghost in the state DB
A renamed profile used to leave the state DB pointing at the old name. PR #112653 migrates that identity, adds a retry command, and tombstones deleted profiles.
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Gateway profile multiplexing is on by default now
gateway.multiplex_profiles now defaults to on, but a boot guard settles an unset flag at every boot: one gateway serves all profiles only when the fold is safe.
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Why state.db Gets Corrupted Inside Docker Desktop, OrbStack and WSL2 Mounts
Bind-mount your data directory into a container and virtiofs or 9p cannot give SQLite WAL the shared lock it needs, so two writers corrupt state.db quietly while every integrity check passes. Since PR #111433, Hermes says so at startup and in hermes doctor, with two concrete fixes.
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