GitHub Repo
Hermes Agent Community Reports Missing History After Compaction; Desktop Edits May Select the Wrong Duplicate Prompt
A November 1 report from the Hermes Agent community says that after in-place compaction, the history API may omit archived messages, causing inconsistencies between desktop display and edit positioning. The author has published tests and a patch branch, but maintainers had not confirmed or officially merged the fix at the time of review.
On November 1, the Hermes Agent community reported a long-conversation consistency issue: after in-place compaction, session.history may omit replies and audio messages that were previously displayed and are now archived. These messages remain visible through other read paths for the same conversation, leaving clients with inconsistent histories. The report targets the main branch as of that date and includes a reproduction test and a public patch branch; it should not yet be considered an officially released fix. Issue and reproduction details
The official documentation says Hermes stores complete messages and data such as tool calls in SQLite. Compaction reduces the context currently used by the model; it does not mean that records are deleted. The documentation also says that display exports should include turns archived by in-place compaction, while full backups additionally retain data removed through reverts or edits. These design choices make “which messages the model currently reads” a different data view from “which history the user should see.” Official session documentation
According to the reporter’s analysis, the issue is that the history API reads only the active conversation context, while the desktop display includes archived turns. If a user interrupts a task and edits an earlier message whose text matches the latest prompt, the sequence numbers used by the positioning logic may become misaligned. In the author’s probe, an earlier continue was resolved as the latest one; the reported message count also did not match the actual returned list. These results are currently based on the author’s tests and have not been independently reproduced. Technical analysis
The proposed fix is to merge the displayed history with active messages, mark archived rows, and adjust edit positioning and counting accordingly. For agent systems engineers, the issue highlights the data contract after compaction: the UI, history API, and edit operations need to share consistent message identities to avoid ambiguity when prompts have identical text. Follow-up should track whether the patch is merged and whether regression tests cover archiving, reverting, and duplicate prompts. The available evidence is insufficient to conclude that the underlying data was deleted.