Hermes Coach troubleshooting — Plugins for Hermes

Common failures

“no coach model configured”: Expected until you choose a model. Open Settings → Plugins → Coach, or run /coach model.
No Coach page in Settings: The Desktop half is off. Enable it in Settings → Plugins, then reload desktop plugins with ⌘K.
The model picker is empty: The host returned no providers. Authenticate one in Hermes first.
A per-mode model fails while the shared model works: Grant the model-override permission on the Status tab, or run /coach grant.
Active review never fires: It is off by default, and the default cadence ignores turns that made no tool calls.
Completion review never fires: It only runs on turns that edited files. A turn that only answered a question has no diff to review.
The gate keeps sending the agent back: Lower “Holds allowed per request”. One per request is the intended setting.
Reviews stopped on their own: The session budget was reached. The default soft stop disables the automatic modes but leaves consults working.

Tested on Linux, macOS and Windows — the GitHub Actions matrix runs the full suite on all three for every push.
Messaging surfaces (Telegram, Discord and similar) never receive corrective turns; advice stays ambient there.
Ambient advice arrives one turn late by design, and a note whose turns expire is dropped rather than delivered stale.
In very long sessions, older turns collapse to one line per tool call. User messages are kept; tool detail is what thins out.
The completion gate reviews a diff, not a plan, a document or a chat answer.
One coach at a time: no panel, no vote.

The plugin touches what it needs and nothing else. This is the catalog-style disclosure, kept here so it is easy to audit.

Network: Consult, Active and Review calls go through the host’s model router. Only the optional Decide backends call out directly — https://openrouter.ai and https://api.typesafe.ai — and only when Decide is enabled. No other third-party traffic, no telemetry.
Reads: The completion review reads the turn’s git diff, worktree status and new files through read-only git commands. The plugin never writes outside $HERMES_HOME/coach/ and the project’s own COACH.md.
Processes: One bounded worker thread runs background reviews inside the hook budgets. The only child processes are the read-only git queries. Nothing inherits YOLO or non-interactive mode, and anything awaiting a person fails rather than hanging under cron or the gateway.
Credentials: Decide keys are declared under requires_env and read through the host’s profile-scoped secret scope. No key is written to config.yaml, and no credential file is read directly.