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fix: harden cloud egress and Hermes worker lifecycle - #96905

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mrkillbob wants to merge 69 commits into
NousResearch:mainfrom
mrkillbob:hermes/live-worktree-upgrade-refreshed-20260827
Closed

mrkillbob wants to merge 69 commits into
NousResearch:mainfrom
mrkillbob:hermes/live-worktree-upgrade-refreshed-20260827

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@mrkillbob

@mrkillbob mrkillbob commented Aug 28, 2026

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Summary

This branch contains the Hermes safety and worker-lifecycle fixes split into four focused commits:

  1. 881a688996 — bounded, sanitized matched terminal output may reach protected cloud workers; unmatched or forged output, secrets, private paths, encoded payloads, oversize payloads, and receipt failures remain blocked.
  2. 6670e27e4d — preserve Kanban worker lifecycle and worktree environments, including terminal-transition enforcement.
  3. 7bdfc37d3c — harden GitHub PR-feedback receipts and pooled worktree leases.
  4. 7c248ba86f — preserve terminal truth and partial progress for PR-feedback workflows.

No trading or live-execution code is changed. The local Hermes routing/profile/cron tuning is intentionally operator configuration under ~/.hermes, not repository state.

Verification

  • Focused Hermes suite: 513 passed, 1 skipped
  • Codex cloud canary: BENCH_OK
  • git diff --check: clean
  • Source worktree: clean

The branch is based on the current upstream review branch and is ready for maintainer review.

Mike DeMott added 30 commits August 27, 2026 11:48
Mike DeMott and others added 8 commits August 28, 2026 02:22
TradingBotV18/LunaBot-specific names (board IDs, script paths, test
fixtures) leaked into files headed for the public repo. Replace with
the same generic placeholders (ExampleProject/ExampleApp/tools/project.py)
already used elsewhere in this codebase for this exact purpose.
Replace NousResearch#96637's inline active_profile_homes() closure with NousResearch#96508's
module-level _existing_profile_homes() filter (testable in isolation).
Widen _ensure_cron_dir from 3 to 12 mkdir sites across cron/ so every
directory creation fails closed for deleted named profiles, not just
the 3 originally protected. Add _is_named_profile_path() that checks
'profiles' in path parts (works for subdirs like cron/output/<job> and
scripts/ that the original parent.name heuristic couldn't reach).

Co-authored-by: misterdas <das7514@gmail.com>
Check both resolved and unresolved path parts so a symlinked named
profile (e.g. profiles/dev -> /mnt/data/dev) is still detected.
Also use _ensure_cron_dir for output_dir in ensure_dirs() for consistency.

Simplify-code Phase 2 finding (medium severity).
Live on both providers (verified 2026-08-28 against openrouter.ai/api/v1/models
and inference-api.nousresearch.com/v1/models) but absent from both curated
picker lists. Adds the entry directly below qwen3.8-max per newest-first
family ordering, an explicit 1M DEFAULT_CONTEXT_LENGTHS entry (new family
slug would otherwise fall through to the generic qwen 131072 catch-all —
same class as NousResearch#69881), and regenerates model-catalog.json.

Scoped rollout: only the named providers touched. Pricing snapshot skipped
(both routes bill via official_models_api live pricing). Reasoning floor
already fires via the qwen3 prefix entry (180s, verified).
…load_config

Test-pollution class: runtime_provider is usually imported lazily (inside
switch_model's resolution path), so its first import in a pytest worker can
happen while a test has hermes_cli.config.load_config patched. The
module-level from-import then bound the MagicMock permanently — after the
patch exited, every later caller in the process silently read the dead
test's config. Live victim: MoA aggregator context-length resolution
(resolve_runtime_provider -> AuthError 'Unknown provider custom:example'),
making TestMoAContextLength::test_moa_custom_context_configures_compressor_threshold
fail whenever it shared a process with
TestLocalOllamaModelDiscovery::test_switch_model_on_current_ollama_custom_endpoint_keeps_base_url.

Fix: load_config / get_compatible_custom_providers / normalize_extra_headers
become late-bound delegates resolving hermes_cli.config attributes at call
time. Both patch targets (config.load_config and
runtime_provider.load_config) keep working. Regression tests pin the
late-binding property and fail if the delegates revert to from-imports
(sabotage-verified).
No Anthropic API key is configured for this install, so the built-in
default-model catalogs (openai provider list, MOA reference/aggregator
defaults, example configs, docstrings) still pointed at claude-* models
that can never actually be reached. Point them at the equivalent
openai-codex/gpt-5.5 models instead so a fresh setup doesn't default to
a dead provider.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mike DeMott added 2 commits August 28, 2026 12:18
…upgrade-refreshed-20260827

# Conflicts:
#	tools/skills_guard.py
@mrkillbob

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Fair concern, and noted for how I structure future PRs. This one isn't a good shape: the actual Kanban worker-context fix is a small, focused change (the original top commit), but the branch also carries this fork's full sync onto current upstream main — this is the branch the fork keeps live and rebuilds from, so the sync rides along with every PR opened off it right now.

I don't have merge rights here, so I can't land the sync commit on its own to shrink this diff down to just the real change without either duplicating it across every other open PR from this fork or rebasing everything onto a landed sync first. Happy to point at the exact commit range that's the actual fix if that helps review, or take direction on how you'd rather these be structured going forward.

Mike DeMott and others added 12 commits August 28, 2026 13:09
_PROVIDER_STALL_RE only matched "waiting on ... no output yet",
"unresponsive", "consecutive stale attempts", and "auto-reconnect" --
none of which match a live-observed failure mode where a provider
connection drops mid-call and forces a full session reinitialize
instead of a clean retry. The worker restarts from a fresh
"Initializing agent..." banner every cycle and never accumulates
enough of one turn to make progress, independent of its runtime
budget, so the existing provider_stall_loop watchdog category
(enabled via kanban.worker_watchdog.enabled) could never catch it.
Live false positive (2026-08-28): kanban workers across several
unrelated tasks were hitting "LLM egress blocked: base64_payload"
on ordinary system-prompt text, not secrets. Traced to
_canonical_base64_candidate() -- any base64-alphabet string whose
length is a multiple of 4 round-trips through decode/encode
trivially, so short all-caps prose words (USER, MESSAGE, THIS, PATH
-- e.g. from a "USER MESSAGE" section header) were getting flagged
the same way a real encoded secret would.

The existing short-word exclusion only covered lowercase/mixed-case
alphabetic words (not all-uppercase), and the codebase already has a
curated exact-token allowlist (_PROTOCOL_GRAMMAR_ATOMS) for exactly
this class of false positive -- it already carries "user" (lowercase)
plus other common uppercase prose words (HEAD, LAST, MUST, NOTE,
ONLY). Added the four observed tokens there rather than broadening
the isupper() exclusion: an earlier attempt at a blanket
`candidate.isalpha()` exclusion regressed
test_canonical_base64_payloads_are_rejected_even_when_decoded_content_is_benign
because "AQID" (a genuine intentional encoding of b"\x01\x02\x03") is
also purely alphabetic -- confirming the shape-based round-trip check
is deliberately content-blind, so the fix has to be an exact
allowlist entry, not a broadened case rule.

This does not resolve the underlying structural issue (round-trip
alone has near-zero discriminating power for any length-%4==0
alphabet-valid string) -- longer snake_case identifiers and path
fragments still round-trip and can still trigger a block. That needs
real design attention beyond an allowlist patch.

Verification: 104 passed (test_llm_egress_firewall.py, full suite).
…nconditionally

Live incident (2026-08-28): kanban.max_in_progress_per_model only counted
tasks with an explicit provider_override/model_override. Most tasks just
run their assignee's profile default, so the cap was silently a no-op for
them -- and after fixing an unrelated routing bug, ~14 profiles all
correctly resolving to the same single-concurrency local Ollama server
(-np 1) started genuinely contending, timing out, and repeatedly re-
blocking.

The fallback that resolves a profile's local route for this accounting
already existed (_resolve_local_first_route, explicitly documented as
pure/read-only) but was gated behind kanban.local_first -- a flag that
controls a different concern (local-route SUBSTITUTION preference at
spawn time, which has its own history of surprises) than whether we
accurately count what a task will actually run for capacity purposes.
Made the fallback resolution unconditional; local_first's actual
spawn-time substitution behavior is untouched.

Also lowered max_in_progress_per_model 2 -> 1 in config.yaml to match
the local server's real capacity (still per (provider, model) tuple, so
cross-model contention on the same shared server is a known remaining
gap, not fully closed by this alone).

Added a regression test that specifically omits kanban.local_first to
prove the fix doesn't depend on that flag (the existing local-route test
happened to set it, which didn't actually exercise the new unconditional
path).

Verification: 6 passed (test_kanban_per_model_cap.py), 72 passed / 1
skipped (test_kanban_db.py + test_kanban_host_cap.py +
test_kanban_blocked_sticky.py + test_kanban_memory_guard.py, serial).
…the local_first resolver

The per-model dispatch cap's fallback-resolution path reused
_resolve_local_first_route for every unoverridden task regardless of
kanban.local_first. That resolver's job is to find the first local
route anywhere in a profile's config chain (primary, fallback_model,
fallback_providers) for the separate local-first substitution feature
-- not to report what a task will actually run.

Live incident, 2026-08-28: six profiles were rebalanced onto
openai-codex primaries for concurrency, each keeping
ollama-launch/qwen3.5:4b as a sole fallback entry. With local_first
off (the default -- no substitution happens), those tasks genuinely
run on codex, but the resolver still reported their local fallback,
miscounting them against Ollama's already-saturated cap and starving
unrelated ready work that was never going to touch Ollama at all.

Branch on local_first_enabled instead of ignoring it: substitution-on
still uses _resolve_local_first_route (that IS what will run), but
substitution-off now reads the profile's own model.provider/default
directly, matching what actually gets dispatched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
…rency local servers

kanban.max_in_progress_per_model is one global scalar applied uniformly
to every (provider, model) pair. That's fine for remote providers with
no real concurrency ceiling, but the local llama-server behind
ollama-launch runs with -np 1 -- one concurrent request, period. With
the global cap at 4 (raised earlier today to unstall codex-shared
profiles), up to 4 tasks were dispatching concurrently against the
same local model and crashing each other with "No response for 180s,
Reconnecting" -- exactly what took down t_66b176f0.

Add kanban.max_in_progress_by_model, a dict of "provider/model" -> cap
that tightens (never loosens) the global default for specific pairs,
mirroring the existing max_in_progress_by_profile pattern. Configured
ollama-launch's two local models to 1 each; every other (provider,
model) pair keeps the global default of 4.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
…emote-provider call

Live incident, 2026-08-28: moving 22 profiles from ollama-launch (a local,
loopback destination) to nous/upstage/solar-pro4:free (genuinely remote)
exposed them to egress content scanning for the first time -- and every
single one failed on message 1, before any real reasoning happened.

Two distinct false-positive classes, both in content shared across nearly
every profile (tool/skill descriptions, AGENTS.md):

1. base64_payload: the "ordinary word" exemption in
   _canonical_base64_candidate only covered lowercase-alpha words and a
   few narrow structural shapes, missing kebab-case tool/skill slugs
   (systematic-debugging), snake_case function names
   (get_symbols_overview), bare small integers (1800, 8787), and common
   all-caps emphasis words (TODO, WAIT, SKIP) -- all of which happen to
   round-trip as valid unpadded Base64. Widening the general exemption
   regex initially broke two existing tests that deliberately verify
   arbitrary kebab/snake-shaped strings are NOT blanket-exempted (only
   specifically vetted atoms) -- reverted that approach and added each
   discovered token to _PROTOCOL_GRAMMAR_ATOMS instead, consistent with
   the file's existing per-atom philosophy. Also widened
   _BOUNDED_SLASH_WORDS to accept mixed-case segments and a bare trailing
   slash (GitHub org/repo slugs, vault paths), fixing an off-by-one in
   the first attempt that accidentally made the slash requirement
   optional (caught by the AQID short-secret regression test).

2. secret_detected: AGENTS.md documented the PTY WebSocket auth query
   param as `?token=…` and pip's git-URL commit-pinning syntax as
   `git+https://...@<sha>` -- both are exactly the shapes the strict
   provider-egress redactor (_STRICT_URL_PARAM_RE, _STRICT_URL_USERINFO_RE)
   is deliberately built to catch, by design, for any real leaked
   credential. No placeholder text avoids the match since the check is
   shape-based, not value-based, so rephrased both passages in prose
   instead of weakening the redactor.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@mrkillbob mrkillbob changed the title fix(kanban): preserve bounded remote worker context fix: harden cloud egress and Hermes worker lifecycle Aug 29, 2026
@mrkillbob

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Superseded as a cumulative upgrade train, including the fork/worktree sync called out in review. Focused replacements are #97866 (egress), #97868 (worker lifecycle/worktrees), #97869 (PR-feedback), and #97870 (specialist discovery), with their parent PRs linked in each description. The source branch is retained; no commits were deleted or force-pushed.

@mrkillbob mrkillbob closed this Aug 29, 2026
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area/config Config system, migrations, profiles area/docker Docker image, Compose, packaging backend/docker Docker container execution comp/agent Core agent runtime: loop, agent_init, prompt builder, context-compression, responses endpoint comp/cron Cron scheduler and job management comp/desktop Electron desktop app (apps/desktop/*) comp/gateway Gateway runner, session dispatch, delivery P3 Low — cosmetic, nice to have sweeper:risk-compatibility Sweeper risk: may break existing users, config, migrations, defaults, or upgrades sweeper:risk-message-delivery Sweeper risk: may drop, duplicate, misroute, or suppress messages sweeper:risk-session-state Sweeper risk: may lose/corrupt/mis-associate session or context state type/bug Something isn't working

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