Local tool-call templates can emit a bare bracketed token (e.g. "[memory]")
as assistant content alongside a function call. The loop treated that
protocol scaffolding as visible content: it got cached as the post-tool
fallback, and when the next turn came back empty, the marker was replayed
as the final response and written into the persisted transcript. Later
context compaction preserved that history, letting the model repeat the
marker in subsequent turns.
Detect content that is only a bracketed marker (`[name]`) when the
response also carries tool_calls, and drop it before it can be cached
or persisted. Scoped narrowly: only fires alongside tool_calls, so a
genuine final response of "[memory]" without a tool call is unaffected.
The 1.0s sleep between sequential tool calls has been present since the
initial commit with no documented rationale. It sleeps between local
tool executions — the next LLM request goes out only after the whole
batch — so it rate-limits nothing, and the parallel read-only path
already runs with no delay. Every multi-tool turn pays (N-1) seconds
of dead time. Remove the sleep, the internal tool_delay plumbing, and
dead test assignments. AIAgent.__init__ keeps tool_delay as a
deprecated no-op keyword for one release so existing programmatic
callers construct cleanly; passing it emits a DeprecationWarning.
Salvage of #63888. The original fix clears stale _last_content_with_tools
on substantive tool-only turns but doesn't clear _mute_post_response, which
a prior housekeeping turn may have set. This suppresses tool progress
output via _vprint until the no-tool-call branch resets it at line ~4834
— after all tools have finished executing.
Fix: also reset _mute_post_response = False when clearing stale fallback.
Added test: verify pure housekeeping turns (content + only housekeeping
tools) still set the fallback correctly — the original use case the
fallback was designed for.
Co-authored-by: liuhao1024 <sunsky.lau@gmail.com>
A cached _last_content_with_tools response from a housekeeping-only turn
could survive a later substantive tool-only turn. When the model returned
an empty response, Hermes incorrectly finalized the older housekeeping
narration instead of invoking the post-tool empty-response nudge.
Production impact: scheduled cron jobs could return early without completing
their actual work (e.g., daily report job returning a housekeeping message
instead of producing the report artifact).
Root cause: The fallback state was only updated when a turn had both
content AND tool_calls. A turn with tool_calls but empty visible content
would skip state updates entirely, leaving stale fallback state intact.
Fix: Classify tools in every tool-call turn (regardless of visible content).
When any tool is substantive (non-housekeeping), clear the older fallback state
before processing later empty responses. This prevents two-turn-old housekeeping
narration from being treated as if it belonged to the immediately preceding
substantive tool turn.
Regression test added: tests/run_agent/test_conversation_fallback_state.py
Fixes#63860
joaomarcos
Teknium
Soju06
kshitijk4poor
liuhao1024