v0.4.0

Hermes Dreaming v0.4.0 — Release Notes

Headline: The trust loop and the friction-killer.

v0.4.0 makes Dreaming safe to use in anger (revert, dry-run, selective apply) and removes the harvest-to-create two-step (one command, real sessions, redacted).

What's new

Trust loop

• dreaming revert <artifact> restores live files from the recorded backups and rolls an applied artifact back to a reverted state. Requires the artifact to be in applied status; anything else fails loud.
  • Drift detection: if the live file changed after apply, a drift_detected audit event is recorded, but the restore still runs from backup.
  • On a missing backup file, revert aborts, leaves live state untouched, and records a revert_failed audit event.
  • Writes a REVERT.md next to the artifact summarizing what was restored, what was rolled back, what drifted, and what failed.
  • Non-interactive callers (cron, pipe) must pass --yes. The CLI exits with code 2 when a confirmation prompt is needed, so scripts can distinguish "needs confirmation" from a real failure.
• dreaming apply --dry-run previews the apply path without writing live state or creating backups. The result includes a structured dry_run_report (would-apply / would-skip / would-backup lists, and per-filter exclusions).
• dreaming apply --priority {low,normal,high} and --target-kind {memory,user,skill,fact} filter which approved proposals land. Filters compose. Filtered-out proposals stay approved so a later apply with a different filter can still land them.

Friction-killer

• dreaming create --from-sessions N auto-harvests N recent local Hermes sessions from the SessionDB, feeds the resulting redacted bundle as a source, and stages the artifact in one step. Always prints harvest:, sessions:, and redactions: to stdout before staging.
• dreaming create --from-since 7d (also 12h, 2w) is a time-window alternative. The count is derived from the window and capped at 50 sessions.
• --recent N is preserved as a back-compat alias for --from-sessions N.
• --no-llm is a shorthand for --provider offline-marker on create and review. Useful for cron jobs that should never reach an external LLM by accident.

Discovery and inbox

• dreaming providers list prints a table with NAME, KIND, STATUS (always | optional | missing), and NOTES for the three built-in providers. No external services are pinged.
• dreaming inbox --apply-ready filters to artifacts where every non-rejected proposal is approved (or already applied) and the artifact is in staged, approved, or applied status. Composes with --state and --priority.
• The inbox digest (dreaming digest --inbox) now surfaces a "Ready to apply" section and an Apply-ready count field at the top.

Hardening

• reject --reason is enforced at the command layer (commands/review.py:reject_artifact()), not just the CLI parser. Any caller (CLI, library, plugin) is constrained by the same rule. ReviewError is raised on missing, empty, or whitespace-only reasons.

Data model

Two additive fields on DreamArtifact:

• reverted_at: str | None — ISO timestamp of the last revert, if any
• revert_audit_events: list[dict] — the revert audit trail (drift events, restore summary, partial-failure summary)

A third field, dry_run_report, is attached in-memory only during a single apply dry-run call and excluded from manifest.json so the on-disk contract stays stable across the dry-run feature.

Migration / compatibility

• The recent flag is unchanged in behavior; --from-sessions is the new preferred name. Both work.
• The reject enforcement is stricter than v0.3.0. Library callers that previously passed reason=None to reject_artifact will now raise ReviewError.
• apply gained three optional flags (--dry-run, --priority, --target-kind). Existing invocations are unchanged.

Verification

• pytest -q passes (112 tests across 25 files, +31 from v0.3.0).
• python -m build --wheel succeeds.
• git diff --check clean.
• Smoke-tested on temp fixtures for: revert (roundtrip, drift, missing backup, partial failure), apply --dry-run (preview without writes), apply --priority and --target-kind (filters), inbox --apply-ready, providers list, --from-sessions with redaction stats, and --no-llm translation.

Known limitations

• Revert does not re-run validation. It is a restore from backup, not a re-apply. If a reverted proposal is reapplied, validation runs normally as part of the apply path.
• Drift detection compares the live file's pre-restore content to the recorded backup snapshot, but does not currently track per-write post-apply shas. Adding a per-write post-apply sha is a v0.5.0 candidate.
• The --from-since window-to-count heuristic is conservative (4 sessions per day, capped at 50). If you want a more aggressive count, use --from-sessions N directly.

Bottom line

This release delivers the two things that turn Dreaming from "demo-able" to "operator's default nightly loop":

1. You can undo an apply. Revert is the trust headline.
2. You can stage from real sessions in one command. --from-sessions is the friction-killer.

Direction A (operator trust) and Direction B (friction-killer) from the brainstorm — both shipped, both tested, both documented.