Add a pytest-discovered tests/conftest.py for the last30days scripts path and
remove duplicate per-file sys.path.insert boilerplate from tests.
Normalize affected imports to rely on the shared scripts path and remove the
now-unneeded E402 suppressions.
PR #285 introduced the stderr warning "No --plan and no LLM provider
configured. Using deterministic fallback..." The 2026-04-19 Run 1
agent self-debug said it read that as "I don't have a key, I can't do
LLM stuff, I have to accept fallback" - which is the exact wrong
mental model. The word "provider" referred to the engine's INTERNAL
planner credentials, but the agent parsed it as "I need credentials
to plan at all."
Rewritten to say plainly: YOU are the reasoning model hosting this
skill (Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, Gemini, or any agent runtime);
YOU ARE the planner; you do not need an API key or credentials - you
ARE the LLM. The --plan flag exists precisely so a reasoning model
generates its own plan upstream and passes it to the engine. The
deterministic fallback is the headless/cron path only.
Runtime enumeration is explicit so agents on every supported runtime
recognize themselves - this skill ships to Claude Code, Codex, Hermes,
and ~/.agents via sync.sh.
Tests: updated test_fallback_logs_warning_when_no_provider to assert
the new language (YOU ARE the planner, runtime names present) and
assert the old misleading phrasing is absent. Renamed the companion
test for clarity.
Topics with suffixes like "use cases", "workflows", "review",
"examples" were previously echoed near-verbatim into search_query,
returning near-zero matches because nobody posts the literal phrase
(2026-04-19 Hermes Agent Use Cases failure).
Unit 2 — planner breadth:
1. Planner prompt rule: STRIP intent-modifier phrases from search_query
(keep them in ranking_query). Paraphrase across 4-5 subqueries that
each express the intent differently.
2. Planner prompt rule: quote only multi-word proper nouns like
"Hermes Agent", not the user's full topic.
3. Raise _max_subqueries cap from 3 to 5 for how_to / opinion / product /
breaking_news / prediction. Comparison stays at 4; factual / concept
stay at 2 unless the topic carries an intent modifier.
4. Deterministic fallback: when intent is non-{comparison,prediction}
and topic contains an intent modifier, append 3 paraphrased
subqueries (workflows, production, experience).
Unit 3 — deterministic fallback defaults:
5. _infer_intent default changed from "breaking_news" to "concept".
Prior default forced strict_recent freshness on unclassified topics,
biasing against older relevant material. Recency-signal regexes
("trending", "this week", etc.) added above the default so genuinely
time-sensitive topics still classify correctly.
6. _keyword_query now quotes only title-cased multi-word proper nouns
("Hermes Agent", "Claude Code"), not the user's full typed topic.
Hyphenated compounds and lowercase terms are left as bare keywords
so platform tokenizers broaden rather than narrow retrieval.
7. New stderr warning when plan_query runs with no --plan and no LLM
provider: surfaces that the deterministic fallback path is weaker
than the --plan-from-Claude-Code path, so callers know to generate
and pass a plan.
Tests: 37 planner tests pass, including 11 intent-modifier and 7
fallback-defaults tests.
Trevin Chow