Responds to hermes-sweeper review on #54717: existing tests only mocked
platform_registry.get(). Add a hermetic fake deferred-loader test that
runs real PlatformRegistry resolution → PluginContext.register_cli_command
→ argparse subparser/choices visibility, without Photon SDK imports.
Closes#54678
`hermes photon ...` could fail with argparse `invalid choice: 'photon'`
even when the bundled Photon platform plugin is present. Photon registers
its top-level CLI command from the platform adapter module via
`ctx.register_cli_command(name="photon", ...)`, but bundled platform
plugins are cheap-registered as *deferred* entries to avoid importing every
gateway SDK during normal startup.
On the unknown-top-level-command slow path, `discover_plugins()` records the
deferred loader but never imports the matching platform module, so the CLI
registration side effect doesn't run and `photon` stays absent from
`_cli_commands` — argparse then rejects it.
Fix: after `discover_plugins()` on that slow path, resolve only the deferred
platform whose name matches the first positional token (via
`platform_registry.get(name)`) before reading `_cli_commands`. This imports
exactly the targeted platform, leaving normal startup cheap (a bare `hermes`
or flags-only invocation has no positional token and touches nothing). The
resolution is best-effort: registry/import failures are logged at debug and
never crash startup.
Added 3 tests in tests/hermes_cli/test_startup_plugin_gating.py: resolves the
matching platform, ignores empty/None command, and swallows registry errors.
Fails without the fix (symbol absent).
`hermes --help` drops from ~700ms to ~180ms; `hermes version` from
~950ms to ~240ms. ~4-5x startup speedup on inspection / diagnostic
invocations.
Changes:
- hermes_cli/main.py: gate the argparse-setup `discover_plugins()` call
behind `_plugin_cli_discovery_needed()`. Eager plugin imports
(google.cloud.pubsub_v1, aiohttp, grpc, PIL) cost 500-650ms and are
pure waste when the user is running a built-in subcommand that
doesn't take plugin extensions (`--help`, `version`, `logs`,
`config`, `sessions`, etc.). New `_BUILTIN_SUBCOMMANDS` frozenset
+ `_first_positional_argv` helper handle flag-value skipping
(`-m gpt5 chat` → still fast).
- hermes_cli/main.py: `cmd_version` now reads the OpenAI SDK version
via `importlib.metadata` (~2ms) instead of `import openai` (~800ms
of pydantic type-module loading).
Agent-running paths (`hermes chat`, `hermes gateway run`) are
unaffected — the second `discover_plugins()` call later in `main()`
still runs so plugin hooks / tools wire up normally.
Tests:
- tests/hermes_cli/test_startup_plugin_gating.py: parity test guards
the `_BUILTIN_SUBCOMMANDS` set against drift (every registered
subparser must be declared; no phantom entries). Behavior tests for
flag-value skipping, `--` terminator, inline `--flag=value` form.
37 tests.
