Hermes Agent identified and patched its own prompting blind spots through
automated self-evaluation — running 64+ tool-use benchmarks across GPT-5.4
and Codex-5.3, diagnosing 5 failure modes, writing targeted prompt patches,
and verifying the fix in a closed loop.
Failure modes discovered and fixed:
- Mental arithmetic (wrong answers: 39,152,053 vs correct 39,151,253)
- User profile hallucination ('Windows 11' when running on Linux)
- Time guessing without verification
- Clarification-seeking instead of acting ('open where?' for port checks)
- Hash computation from memory (SHA-256, encodings)
- Confusing system RAM with agent's own persistent memory store
Two new XML sections added to OPENAI_MODEL_EXECUTION_GUIDANCE:
- <mandatory_tool_use>: explicit categories that must always use tools
- <act_dont_ask>: default to action on obvious interpretations
Results:
gpt-5.4: 68.8% → 100% tool compliance (+31.2pp)
gpt-5.3-codex: 62.5% → 100% tool compliance (+37.5pp)
Regression: 0/8 conversational prompts over-tooled
c8a5e36be8