Scarf v2.18.0

Scarf v2.18.0

The Hermes v0.20 parity release. Hermes shipped its two biggest releases of the year back-to-back — v0.19 "Quicksilver" and v0.20 "Herald," ~5,700 commits — and this release keeps Scarf fully compatible with both while adopting the best of what landed: pinned sessions and activity in the sidebar, per-model cost breakdowns, richer session exports, approval-allowlist suggestions, cron run history, and tidy compaction summaries in chat. It also fixes six long-standing bugs the compatibility audit flushed out — including one where uninstalling or updating a Skill from the UI had never actually worked — and ships a community-contributed performance win that makes remote chats load dramatically faster. Everything new is capability-gated: on a pre-0.20 Hermes host, Scarf behaves exactly as before.

Remote chats load dramatically faster

Community-contributed: #136 by @LiamVan6868 — thank you!

Resuming a remote chat used to pay one SSH round-trip per 5-message page just to hydrate tool-call cards — six round-trips for a 30-message session, before the skeleton and tool-result fetches. Those pages now fold into a single batched round-trip, and the JSON row parser was rewritten as a single-pass byte scan (one traversal instead of two, no substring copies). The oversized-blob fallback that isolates "whale" tool calls is preserved intact. On top of that, the remote result parser now bounds-checks batch markers from the wire, so a misbehaving host can no longer crash the app with a malformed response.

Hermes v0.20 compatibility

Scarf now targets Hermes v0.20.0 (v2026.8.3), with v0.6.0+ still fully supported:

• /compress — Hermes renamed /compact; Scarf's command menu follows suit on 0.20 hosts (and keeps /compact on older ones — never both).
• Curator keeps counting — Hermes reworded the curator status header; Scarf's parser now reads both generations, plus the new agent-created/bundled split and unmanaged-skills count.
• Provider catalog refresh — Vercel AI Gateway is back (with aggregator handling), Fireworks AI and Google Vertex AI join the picker, Upstage Solar gets its alias, and retired DeepSeek models (deepseek-chat, deepseek-reasoner) resolve to their deepseek-v4-flash replacement instead of dangling.
• Buzz — Block's Nostr-based messenger, new in Hermes 0.20, appears in the gateway platform roster.
• Max turns — Hermes raised the default agent turn limit 60 → 500; Scarf's Settings display follows the connected host's actual default.

New: session pins, activity, and per-model costs

On a 0.20 host (schema-detected, zero change on older databases):

• Pinned sessions float to the top of the chat sidebar with a pin badge, and each row shows Hermes's last-activity description — what the agent actually did most recently, not just a timestamp.
• The Dashboard breaks cost down by model — tokens and spend per model across your sessions, from Hermes's new per-model usage ledger.

New: richer session exports

The export flow gains a format picker on 0.20 hosts: Markdown, HTML, Quarto, and trace join JSONL, plus a "Redact secrets" toggle that runs Hermes's scrubbing pass. On remote connections the picker offers the streaming formats (JSONL, trace) so exports always land on your Mac, never stranded on the server.

New: approval suggestions and cron run history

• Allowlist suggestions — Hermes 0.20 can mine your approval history into allowlist proposals (approvals suggest). Scarf surfaces them in Settings → Security with a one-click Add per proposal — each application is explicit, no bulk auto-apply.
• Cron run history — each cron job's detail pane gains a run-history disclosure: past executions with status, source, and error output, straight from Hermes's new execution ledger.

Chat: compaction summaries, folded

When Hermes compacts a long session, the summary it writes into history now renders as a collapsed "Conversation compacted" disclosure row instead of a wall of bracketed text — expand it when you want it, ignore it when you don't. Detection matches Hermes's own summary markers, so it works on every session with persisted summaries.

Six bugs the audit caught (all pre-existing)

The compatibility audit re-verifies every CLI call, config key, and platform id Scarf uses against Hermes source — and this cycle that sweep found six things that were broken long before 0.20:

• Skill uninstall/update never worked. Both passed a --yes flag Hermes has never had, so the CLI exited with a usage error every time. Fixed (uninstall also answers Hermes's confirmation prompt properly).
• The "runtime metadata footer" toggle wrote a key Hermes doesn't read (agent.runtime_metadata_footer); it now writes the real display.runtime_footer.enabled.
• Google Chat and Microsoft Teams used the wrong platform ids (google-chat/microsoft-teams vs Hermes's google_chat/teams), so platform detection and config edits missed. The Google Chat allowlist editor is also gone — Hermes gates that platform by user env, and the key Scarf wrote was never read.
• The per-platform "busy acknowledgment" toggle was a silent no-op — Hermes only reads the global display.busy_ack_enabled, which Scarf now writes.
• A "slash command notice TTL" setting wrote a key that doesn't exist in any Hermes version; removed.
• iOS Google Chat status now detects configuration correctly (same mechanism as the Mac app).

Under the hood

• New v0.20 capability group in HermesCapabilities with a full degradation test cluster; every new surface in this release hides itself on pre-0.20 hosts.
• Provider tables are verified mechanically against the Hermes checkout (scripts/check-hermes-tables.py, default path now ~/.hermes/hermes-agent).
• 75 new tests across capabilities, parsers, schema detection, export argv, and compaction classification; the suite now runs 1,065 tests.

Upgrade notes

• Sparkle will offer the update automatically, or use Scarf → Check for Updates. macOS 14.6+ deployment target unchanged.
• Hermes target: v0.20.0 (v2026.8.3). Everything new is capability-gated or schema-detected — Hermes v0.6.0 through v0.19.x hosts keep working exactly as before, minus the new 0.20-only surfaces.
• iOS / ScarfGo: shares the platform-id and connection fixes via the common package; they ride the next TestFlight build.