Bitter Frontier What coding agents just made possible, where the bottleneck moved, and what deserves attention.

Evidence record / hermes-agent

A dated record of one change, kept so the writing that cites it can be checked. Compiled from the sources listed below by the research run, not written for reading. The judgment lives in the issues that cite it, below.

2026-10-13-hermes-agent-compaction-on-1m-window-models-moved-from-a-256k-cap-to-half-the-window-in-v0-21-6-and-a

Compaction on 1M-window models moved from a 256K cap to half the window in v0.21.6, and a seeded 256000 cap is migrated away. Since #115986 every context window above about 341K compacted at 256K tokens, so a 1M-window model compacted at a quarter of its window and a compression.threshold above that was ignored. v0.21.6 makes the absolute cap opt-in again and lets the ratio decide, which at the default 0.50 means compaction near 500K tokens on a 1M model. Config v47 deletes threshold_tokens from config.yaml only when it equals exactly 256000, the value the seeder and hermes doctor --fix wrote; any other value survives.

Channel: tagged-release. Half: both. Date: 2026-10-08.

Operator consequence: Long sessions on 1M-window models carry up to about twice as many input tokens per request before compaction on v0.21.6+, on top of an unlimited default turn count. If spend matters, set compression.threshold_tokens to an explicit value other than 256000 (250000 keeps the old behavior) so the migration leaves it alone, or lower compression.threshold, and re-baseline cost comparisons made on earlier tags.

Receipt

Finding metadata

Confidence
high

Run: 2026-10-13-profile-refresh-2026-09-21_2026-10-13-frontier-v0

Finding ID: 2026-10-13-hermes-agent-compaction-on-1m-window-models-moved-from-a-256k-cap-to-half-the-window-in-v0-21-6-and-a

Profile citations

Source links

Primary links, including exact changelog lines when available.

  1. Hermes Agent
    commit2026-10-13-hermes-agent-compaction-on-1m-window-models-moved-from-a-256k-cap-to-half-the-window-in-v0-21-6-and-agithub.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/commit/98278833e29b167fe930e276eed7cb16bee68673tagged commit file2026-10-13-hermes-agent-compaction-on-1m-window-models-moved-from-a-256k-cap-to-half-the-window-in-v0-21-6-and-aNousResearch/hermes-agent / hermes_cli/config_defaults.py#L577-L594tagged commit file2026-10-13-hermes-agent-compaction-on-1m-window-models-moved-from-a-256k-cap-to-half-the-window-in-v0-21-6-and-aNousResearch/hermes-agent / hermes_cli/config_defaults.py#L553-L571

Versioned source: run artifact