hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix Chat gateways should not send backend status/errors for empty responses

Summary

When a chat-platform agent intentionally produces no user-facing text (for example because a prompt/routing rule says to stay silent), Hermes can leak backend lifecycle/error/status messages into user-visible channels.

This makes a valid silent outcome look like a broken bot.

Observed leak paths

Examples of messages that can appear in chat channels:

• Empty response from model — retrying (n/3)
• The model returned no response after processing tool results...
• Codex response remained incomplete after 3 continuation attempts
• lifecycle/tool/progress messages such as terminal/read/patch/interruption status

Expected behavior

For chat platforms where silence is a valid routing outcome:

• empty model output should send nothing to the channel
• retry/status/debug/tool lifecycle messages should be logged only
• internal sentinel values such as (empty) should never be user-visible
• normal non-empty assistant responses should still be delivered as usual

This is especially important in shared/group channels, where debug text creates noise and makes the agent appear broken.

Likely areas to fix

The issue appears to involve multiple paths rather than a single prompt problem:

• run_agent.py lifecycle status emission (_emit_status / status callback path)
• gateway status callback forwarding to platform adapters
• gateway empty-response normalization from (empty) into user-facing text
• gateway conversion of empty final_response plus error into a visible warning response
• tool/progress/interruption event rendering in chat channels

Suggested fix

Introduce a platform/channel-level policy for user-visible diagnostics, e.g.:

• keep lifecycle/debug/status events in logs by default for shared chat platforms
• only send final assistant content when non-empty
• treat empty output as a valid no-op, not an error message
• make any visible diagnostic behavior opt-in/configurable

No private logs, chat IDs, user IDs, tokens, or local paths are included here.