Hermes Desktop Lands Four Perf PRs in a Day - Streaming, Timeline, Picker, Multitab

X API was paywalled today (HTTP 402 on all search queries). This roundup is sourced from the GitHub API, which surfaced 20 feature and performance PRs merged in the last 48 hours. The strongest signal was a four-PR desktop performance cluster by OutThisLife, plus a dramatic CLI startup speedup and the curator adopt feature from teknium1.

Desktop perf cluster - four PRs, one author

Four performance PRs merged on July 26, all by OutThisLife. Together they added 1,213 lines across 22 files.

Streaming cost decoupled from transcript length (#71835, +377/-23, 8 files). Streaming into a long conversation got progressively slower because two whole-transcript passes ran on every streamed delta - roughly 30 times a second. Both passes now scale with what changed rather than total history.

Thread timeline deferred until visible (#71789, +331/-38, 4 files). The right-edge prompt rail did its work unconditionally, even for background tabs. The transcript selector, scroll-sync, and highlight dispatch now defer until the tab is active.

Faster model picker open and idle CPU on stacked tabs (#71799, +202/-45, 4 files). The model picker was rendering ~90 rows of switches and radio groups eagerly on open - the largest app-code slice in the CPU profile. Bodies now render as children of Radix submenu panels, deferring work to hover. Background tabs also stop ticking their model-resolution intervals.

Multitab streaming sessions made fast (#71780, +303/-4, 6 files). With multiple session tabs streaming at once, every delta flush re-rendered every busy tab's thread. A visibility context now freezes hidden tabs' transcripts, catching up in one commit on reveal.

These four PRs continue the desktop speed wave that shipped in v0.19.0 "Quicksilver" (July 20), which already included 20 desktop perf PRs.

CLI startup: 14s to 1.8s

teknium1's #71637 (+371/-14, 2 files) cuts hermes -w startup from roughly 14 seconds to 1.8 seconds - a 7.8x improvement. The bottleneck was _prune_stale_worktrees, which ran synchronously before the prompt and shelled out to git several times per candidate worktree. On a 44-worktree checkout, this accounted for 18.5 seconds of a 20.6-second cold start.

The fix parallelised the git calls and added a cache so unreapable worktrees (most of them, since they hold real work) are skipped on subsequent runs.

Curator adopt: 112 skills now visible

teknium1's #71648 (+790/-33, 9 files) adds hermes curator adopt for skills the curator can see but cannot manage. On a 237-skill library, 112 skills were curation-eligible but invisible to automatic transitions - they predated the created_by: agent marker introduced in May 2026, or were installed manually without a usage record.

The adoption workflow: hermes curator status surfaces unmanaged skills; hermes curator adopt --all brings them under curator management; the background review fork then handles staleness, archiving, and dependency tracking as usual.

Skills referenceable anywhere in the TUI composer

OutThisLife's #71697 (+295/-20, 9 files) extends the skill-slash autocomplete to work at any position in the composer, not just the first character. The slash-detection regex was ^-anchored, which is correct for command execution but blocked inline skill references like "please run /cle". The two positions are now detected separately.

Also merged

benbarclay's Relay Phase 4 (+620/-1, 5 files) adds handoff threads, semantic renames, reply-to context, and a hello command manifest to the relay gateway.

teknium1's stream-only provider support (+417/-95, 6 files) salvages a community PR from @kudi88, adding stream-only provider compatibility and extending the uniform compression ceiling to every compression path.

[^1]: OutThisLife. PR #71835 - perf(desktop): make streaming cost independent of transcript length. Hermes Agent. July 26, 2026. [^2]: OutThisLife. PR #71789 - perf(desktop): stop the thread timeline working when nothing can see it. Hermes Agent. July 26, 2026. [^3]: OutThisLife. PR #71799 - perf(desktop): faster model picker open + idle CPU on stacked tabs. Hermes Agent. July 26, 2026. [^4]: OutThisLife. PR #71780 - perf(desktop): make multitab streaming sessions fast. Hermes Agent. July 26, 2026. [^5]: teknium1. PR #71637 - perf(cli): cut hermes -w startup from ~14s to ~1.8s. Hermes Agent. July 25, 2026. [^6]: teknium1. PR #71648 - feat(curator): surface unmanaged skills and add curator adopt. Hermes Agent. July 26, 2026.