Free-tier users were seeing 'No free models currently available.' in the
`hermes model` and post-login pickers even though qwen/qwen3.6-plus is
free on the Portal right now. Three independent breakages compounded:
1. The docs-hosted catalog manifest at website/static/api/model-catalog.json
was not regenerated when _PROVIDER_MODELS['nous'] was updated, so users
fetching the manifest got a list that didn't include qwen/qwen3.6-plus.
2. _resolve_nous_pricing_credentials() returned ('', '') on any auth blip,
collapsing get_pricing_for_provider('nous') to {} and making every
curated model fall through the free-tier filter as 'paid'.
3. Even with healthy pricing, the picker only ever showed models from the
in-repo curated list intersected with live pricing — a Portal-flagged
free model not yet in the curated list could never appear.
Changes:
- hermes_cli/models.py: new union_with_portal_free_recommendations() that
augments the curated list with Portal freeRecommendedModels entries
(with synthetic free pricing so partition keeps them). The Portal's
/api/nous/recommended-models endpoint is now the source of truth for
free-tier surfacing — old Hermes builds will see new free models
without a CLI release.
- hermes_cli/models.py: _resolve_nous_pricing_credentials() falls back to
the public inference base URL when runtime cred resolution fails.
The /v1/models endpoint exposes pricing without auth, so silently
returning {} just because a refresh token expired was wrong.
- hermes_cli/auth.py + hermes_cli/main.py: both free-tier picker call
sites call union_with_portal_free_recommendations() before partition.
- tests/hermes_cli/test_models.py: 7 tests covering union behaviour
(prepend, dedup, end-to-end with stale pricing, empty/missing/error
payloads, invalid entries).
- tests/hermes_cli/test_model_catalog.py: drift guard
TestManifestMatchesInRepoLists fails CI when _PROVIDER_MODELS['nous']
or OPENROUTER_MODELS is edited without re-running
scripts/build_model_catalog.py. Verified empirically that removing a
manifest entry triggers an assertion with an actionable error message.
Validation:
- 133/133 targeted tests pass (test_models, test_model_catalog,
test_auth_nous_provider).
- Live E2E against the real Portal:
- Stale curated list ['claude-opus','claude-sonnet','gpt-5.4'] (no
qwen) → after union: ['qwen/qwen3.6-plus', ...] →
partition(free_tier=True): selectable=['qwen/qwen3.6-plus'].
- Simulated expired refresh token → anon fetch returns 403 pricing
entries including qwen/qwen3.6-plus -> {prompt:0, completion:0}.
- ruff: clean.
e85592591e