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hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix Tool-approval pending state is invisible to the LLM — indistinguishable from "executed + empty result" [1 participants]

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NousResearch/hermes-agent#14806•Fetched 2026-04-24 06:14:37
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When a tool call requires user approval (e.g. terminal commands, file edits), the pending state is not surfaced to the LLM's context. The agent sees "no result came back" and has no way to distinguish:

  • (a) tool ran and returned empty / no matches
  • (b) tool is queued awaiting user approval (never executed)
  • (c) tool failed silently

All three look identical in conversation flow.

Root Cause

Without this, the LLM's internal explanation of "why the tool returned nothing" can drift arbitrarily far from truth, burning context on wrong hypotheses. It's a silent failure mode — the session looks functional, just slower and more confused than it should be.

This isn't a bug in LLM reasoning. The information simply isn't in the context.

Code Example

{"status": "pending_approval", "queued_at": "...", "age_seconds": 47}
RAW_BUFFERClick to expand / collapse

Summary

When a tool call requires user approval (e.g. terminal commands, file edits), the pending state is not surfaced to the LLM's context. The agent sees "no result came back" and has no way to distinguish:

  • (a) tool ran and returned empty / no matches
  • (b) tool is queued awaiting user approval (never executed)
  • (c) tool failed silently

All three look identical in conversation flow.

Concrete incident (2026-04-23)

During a cross-session debug I (Claude Opus 4.7) issued three sequential search_files / grep calls to test a hypothesis about log sanitization. The user was away from screen and did not approve them. From my side each call appeared to return no results. I interpreted this as "hypothesis partially confirmed — the thing I'm grepping for doesn't exist" and chased increasingly contorted alternate explanations for ~10 minutes of context. The correct interpretation — "these never ran" — was not available to me.

User later clarified: the tool-approval prompts had popped up but he wasn't looking at the screen, so nothing was approved. I had no signal to distinguish this from empty results.

Suggested behavior

Surface pending-approval state in the tool result channel with an explicit marker, e.g.:

{"status": "pending_approval", "queued_at": "...", "age_seconds": 47}

rather than returning nothing or a silent empty payload. The LLM can then reason about approval latency vs empty-result explicitly.

Alternative: soft-inject into the next user turn's context when N tool calls are pending > threshold, e.g. [2 tool calls awaiting your approval for 90s].

Why this matters

Without this, the LLM's internal explanation of "why the tool returned nothing" can drift arbitrarily far from truth, burning context on wrong hypotheses. It's a silent failure mode — the session looks functional, just slower and more confused than it should be.

This isn't a bug in LLM reasoning. The information simply isn't in the context.

Environment

  • Hermes Agent v0.10.0 (2026.4.16)
  • Provider: anthropic
  • Model: claude-opus-4-7
  • Platform: Discord (I believe this is platform-agnostic — same mechanism would affect CLI, Telegram, etc. whenever tool approval is manual)
  • Approval mode: manual (tool calls require user click-through)

extent analysis

TL;DR

Surface the pending-approval state in the tool result channel to distinguish between empty results and queued tool calls.

Guidance

  • Implement a pending-approval state marker in the tool result channel, such as the suggested JSON payload {"status": "pending_approval", "queued_at": "...", "age_seconds": 47}.
  • Consider alternative approaches, like soft-injecting pending tool call information into the next user turn's context when a threshold is exceeded.
  • Verify the effectiveness of the solution by testing scenarios where tool calls require user approval and checking that the LLM correctly interprets the pending-approval state.
  • Ensure the solution is platform-agnostic, as the issue affects multiple platforms, including Discord, CLI, and Telegram.

Example

{
  "status": "pending_approval",
  "queued_at": "2026-04-23T14:30:00",
  "age_seconds": 47
}

Notes

The solution relies on modifying the tool result channel to include pending-approval state information, which may require updates to the Hermes Agent or the LLM's context processing logic.

Recommendation

Apply the workaround of surfacing the pending-approval state in the tool result channel, as it directly addresses the issue and provides a clear distinction between empty results and queued tool calls.

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