scarf/releases/v2.6.0/RELEASE_NOTES.md

What's in 2.6.0

A major release tracking Hermes v2026.4.30 (v0.12.0) — the largest single Hermes update Scarf has had to follow since v0.10's Tool Gateway. Headline additions: the autonomous Curator, multimodal image input in chat, 5 new inference providers, Microsoft Teams + Yuanbao gateway platforms, a read-only Kanban view, and ScarfGo gains read-only Webhooks/Plugins/Profiles plus a Hermes-version banner.

Pre-v0.12 Hermes hosts are fully supported. Every new surface is gated on a runtime capability detector (hermes --version → semver), so users on older Hermes installs see the v2.5 surface unchanged. UI doesn't appear until the underlying CLI subcommand exists.

Curator (Mac + iOS)

Hermes v0.12's autonomous skill curator prunes / consolidates / archives agent-created skills on a 7-day schedule. Scarf adds a dedicated Curator sidebar item under Interact (Mac) and a Curator nav row under the System tab (iOS).

• Status panel — enabled/paused/disabled badge, last-run timestamp, last summary, run count, scheduling cadence (interval / stale-after / archive-after).
• Run Now button triggers hermes curator run; pause/resume from the kebab menu.
• Three leaderboards — least-recently-active, most-active, least-active. Each row carries activity / use / view / patch counters and an inline pin toggle.
• Pin / unpin — pinned skills are protected from auto-archive and rewrites. State pulled from ~/.hermes/skills/.curator_state and surfaced as a pin glyph everywhere skills appear (Curator screen, Skills sidebar/list, SkillDetailView).
• Restore archived sheet calls hermes curator restore <name> to bring a previously-archived skill back.
• Last report Markdown — when present, the previous run's REPORT.md renders inline in mono.

Capability-gated; sidebar item disappears on pre-v0.12 hosts.

Multimodal image input in chat (Mac + iOS)

Hermes v0.12 advertises prompt_capabilities.image = true on ACP and accepts image content blocks in session/prompt. Scarf wires the producer side on both targets:

• Mac: paperclip toolbar button on the chat composer opens NSOpenPanel multi-pick. Drag-and-drop and paste also work — drop an image (or a Finder file URL) onto the composer and it attaches. Capability-gated; the entire attachment surface is hidden on pre-v0.12 hosts.
• iOS: paperclip button opens PhotosPicker (multi-select up to 5 photos). Same byte-for-byte capability gate.
• ImageEncoder downsamples to 1568px long-edge (Anthropic's recommended ceiling) at JPEG q=0.85, so a 12 MP screenshot lands under ~300 KB on the wire. Detached only — never blocks MainActor.
• Image-only sends are valid — once at least one attachment is queued, the send button enables even with empty text. Vision models accept "describe this" with no caption.
• Per-attachment chips above the input field with thumbnail + filename tooltip + X to remove. 5-image-per-message cap; total payload stays under ~2 MB so cellular sends don't time out.

Hermes routes the resulting prompt to a vision-capable model automatically — no extra Scarf-side work to pick the right aux model.

5 new inference providers (Mac + iOS)

Five overlay-only providers added to ModelCatalogService.overlayOnlyProviders. The model picker reaches all of them; provider IDs match HERMES_OVERLAYS in hermes_cli/providers.py exactly so a typo here doesn't strand users with an unreachable provider.

• GMI Cloud (api_key) — https://api.gmi-serving.com/v1
• Azure AI Foundry (api_key) — base URL resolved from AZURE_FOUNDRY_BASE_URL per tenant
• LM Studio (api_key, first-class) — promoted from custom-endpoint alias to a real provider; defaults to http://127.0.0.1:1234/v1
• MiniMax (OAuth) (oauth_external) — https://api.minimax.io/anthropic
• Tencent TokenHub (api_key) — base URL resolved from TOKENHUB_BASE_URL

auxiliary.curator aux task (Mac)

Hermes removed auxiliary.flush_memories entirely in v0.12 (the underlying memory pipeline was rewritten) and added auxiliary.curator so the curator's review fork can run on a separate model from the main agent. Settings → Auxiliary now surfaces a Curator row when the active host is v0.12+ (gated on HermesCapabilities.hasCuratorAux); the obsolete Flush Memories panel is gone.

The Tool Gateway health view in HealthView lost the flushMemories-routes-through-Nous row and gained a curator row, matching the new aux task list.

Skills v0.12 surface (Mac + iOS)

Three new capabilities Scarf can now reach:

• Direct-URL install — hermes skills install <https-url> lets users pull a one-off skill without going through a registry. Mac SkillsView gains an "Install from URL…" toolbar button (capability-gated) opening a sheet with the URL field plus optional --category / --name overrides.
• Reload — hermes skills audit rescans the skills directory and refreshes the agent's view without a session restart. Wired to a "Reload" toolbar button next to the install button on Mac.
• Enabled / disabled state — skills.disabled in config.yaml is read at scan time. Disabled skills render strikethrough + an "OFF" pill on Mac and iOS rows; iOS detail view explains the state in plain text.
• Curator pin badge — pinned-skill names from ~/.hermes/skills/.curator_state surface as a pin glyph on each row across Mac sidebar and iOS list, plus an explanatory chip on iOS detail view.

The disable-toggle write path is deferred to v2.7 — Hermes only exposes hermes skills config as an interactive verb today, and we'd rather read accurately than risk clobbering the user's list with a half-tested write.

Cron — --workdir flag (Mac)

Hermes v0.12 cron jobs accept --workdir <absolute-path> to inject AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / .cursorrules from that directory and pin cwd for terminal/file/code_exec tools. Scarf's CronJobEditor now has a Workdir field; both create and edit paths forward the flag. Existing v0.11 jobs keep the no-cwd behaviour by leaving the field blank.

The context_from chaining field is read-only from Scarf this round (Hermes hasn't exposed a --context-from CLI flag yet, only YAML).

Microsoft Teams + Yuanbao (Mac)

Two new gateway platforms. Microsoft Teams (the 19th platform) ships as a plugin; Yuanbao 元宝 (the 18th) is a native gateway adapter. Both surface in the Platforms tab with read-only setup panels — the OAuth dance for Yuanbao and the plugin install for Teams happen outside Scarf.

Read-only Kanban (Mac)

Hermes v0.12 ships a SQLite-backed multi-tenant task board with a full CLI (hermes kanban create / list / claim / dispatch / …). The multi-profile collaboration layer was reverted upstream while the design is reworked, so v2.6 ships a read-only Kanban view: paginated table of hermes kanban list --json filtered by status, with status badges, meta chips (id / assignee / workspace / skills), and per-row metadata. 5-second polling while the view is foregrounded; suspended on disappear.

Create / claim / dispatch UI is deferred until upstream stabilizes — building the editor now would risk rework on a quarter-out timeline.

Settings deltas (Mac)

A new Caching & Redaction section under Settings → Advanced with three v0.12 knobs (gated on capability):

• Prompt cache TTL picker — 5m default / 1h opt-in. Reduces cache writes on long agent loops with stable system prompts.
• Redact secrets in patches toggle — Hermes flipped this off by default in v0.12 because the substitution corrupted patches; security-sensitive users can flip it back on here.
• Runtime metadata footer toggle — opt-in compact footer on each final reply (provider/model/cost/turn count).

TTS provider list gains piper (native local TTS engine new in v0.12). Terminal backend list gains vercel (Vercel Sandbox backend for execute_code/terminal). Both ride along unconditionally — Hermes silently falls back when an older host doesn't recognize the value.

iOS catch-up — Webhooks / Plugins / Profiles (read-only)

Three new System-tab nav rows in ScarfGo, all read-only:

• Webhooks — list of hermes webhook list output with description / deliver / events / route per row. "Platform not enabled" detection so a freshly-installed Hermes shows setup guidance instead of error noise.
• Plugins — filesystem-first scan over ~/.hermes/plugins/ with manifest reads (plugin.json or plugin.yaml). Enabled/disabled badge, version, source, path.
• Profiles — hermes profile list with active-profile highlighting from ~/.hermes/active_profile. Tolerant of both Rich box-drawn and plain-text outputs.

None of the three are capability-gated — the underlying list verbs work on both v0.11 and v0.12. Create / edit / delete remain Mac-only since they touch enough state we keep them off the phone.

Hermes-version banner (iOS)

Yellow banner at the top of the Dashboard tab when the active server is pre-v0.12. Lists the v0.12 capabilities the user is missing out on (curator, multimodal image input, new providers); one-tap session-dismiss; reappears on next app open. Hidden entirely on v0.12+ hosts.

Internal — version-aware capability detection

The foundation of every gated surface above:

• HermesCapabilities value type parses Hermes Agent v0.12.0 (2026.4.30) from hermes --version output. Exposes booleans for each release-gated UI surface (hasCurator, hasACPImagePrompts, hasKanban, hasOneShot, hasSkillURLInstall, hasFallbackCommand, hasUpdateCheck, hasPiperTTS, hasVercelTerminal, hasCuratorAux, hasTeamsPlatform, hasYuanbaoPlatform, hasCronWorkdir, hasPromptCacheTTL, hasRedactionToggle, hasFlushMemoriesAux).
• HermesCapabilitiesStore (@Observable @MainActor) caches per-server capabilities. Injected on ContextBoundRoot (Mac) and ScarfGoTabRoot (iOS) via .environment(_:) and .hermesCapabilities(_:).
• 12 parser tests + 6 curator-output parser tests lock the v0.12 / v0.11 / fallback flag matrices.

Bug fixes

Chat composer + transcript (post-merge round)

• Typing lag in the chat composer (#67) — RichChatInputBar.updateMenuState() ran on every keystroke and unconditionally wrote both showMenu and selectedIndex, tripping SwiftUI's "action tried to update multiple times per frame" warning and stalling input. Composer now coalesces writes to deltas, short-circuits when not in slash mode (the common case), and watches commands.count instead of re-allocating commands.map(\.id) per keystroke.
• Chat font-size slider had no visible effect (#68) — RichChatView only set \.dynamicTypeSize, but ScarfFont tokens are fixed-point (Font.system(size: 14, …)) so dynamic type didn't reach bubble text, reasoning, tool chips, code blocks, or markdown headings. New \.chatFontScale env value plumbed through RichMessageBubble, MarkdownContentView, and CodeBlockView; ChatFontScale.{body, caption, captionStrong, caption2, mono, monoSmall, codeBlock, codeInline}(_:) helpers mirror the ScarfFont base sizes so 100% is byte-for-byte identical to today's UI.
• Placeholder ghosting on first keystroke (#65) — TextEditor's NSTextView surfaces a typed glyph one frame before the SwiftUI binding propagates, so the bare if text.isEmpty overlay rendered the translucent placeholder text on top of the just-typed character. Pinned an opaque background behind the placeholder rect and switched the conditional to .opacity(...) so the view tree stays stable per keystroke.
• Draft text leaked between conversations (#62) — composer @State survived session switches because the surrounding view tree was structurally identical. Bound RichChatInputBar's identity to richChat.sessionId so SwiftUI rebuilds the view (and its @State) on session change. Stable fallback string for the "no session selected" window — UUID() would have minted a new id per body re-eval and trashed the composer mid-typing.
• Sent message rendered blank after navigating away (#63) — when a user sent a prompt and immediately resumed a different session before Hermes flushed the row to state.db, resumeSession's reset() cleared messages and loadSessionHistory then read an as-yet-empty DB. New per-session pending-user-messages cache survives reset() and re-injects still-pending entries on load; entries clear themselves as soon as a matching DB row catches up.
• No completion notification (#64) — sending a long prompt and switching to other work required polling the chat to know when the response landed. New ChatNotificationService fires a local UNUserNotificationCenter banner on prompt completion when Scarf isn't the foreground app. Settings → Display → Feedback → "Notify when Hermes finishes" toggle, default on.
• Per-message TTS playback (#66) — small speaker glyph in each settled assistant bubble's metadata footer; uses AVSpeechSynthesizer with the user's macOS Spoken Content default voice, picks up offline. Markdown control characters stripped before speech. The deeper Settings → Voice provider integration (Edge / ElevenLabs / OpenAI / NeuTTS / Piper) is queued as a v2.7 follow-up.
• ACP control-message timeout under gateway concurrency (#61) — bumped 30s → 60s. State.db lock contention on a healthy host clears in seconds, but the previous 30s watchdog tripped under realistic gateway+ACP concurrency (Discord sync / skill registration / cron scheduling holding write locks during ACP initialize / session/new / session/load). 60s gives lock resolution headroom while still surfacing genuinely broken transports.

Pre-merge

• Test target compile — M5FeatureVMTests.ScriptedTransport had drifted off the ServerTransport protocol after cachedSnapshotPath landed in v2.5.2; added the missing stub. M0dViewModelsTests got the ConnectionStatusViewModel.Status.degraded argument-name update. CredentialPoolsGatingTests got the missing import ScarfCore. The full swift test suite now runs (and passes — 215 tests across 17 suites).
• iOS package compile — RemoteBackupService.zipDirectory and RemoteRestoreService.unzipArchive used Foundation.Process unconditionally, breaking the iOS build entirely (Process is unavailable on the iOS SDK). Wrapped in #if !os(iOS) with iOS stubs that throw — backup/restore is Mac-only by design.

Hermes version

Targets Hermes v2026.4.30 (v0.12.0). v2026.4.23 (v0.11.0) hosts continue to work — every v0.12 surface is gated on capability detection, so Scarf v2.6 against v0.11 looks identical to Scarf v2.5.2 against v0.11. Update Hermes (hermes update) to unlock the new surfaces.

Compatibility

• macOS 14+ (unchanged)
• iOS 17+ (unchanged)
• Hermes v0.11+ for the v2.5 surface; v0.12+ for the new features above.
• No data migrations.