_propare_messages_for_non_vision_model() was only called in the legacy
flag path (no provider profile). Providers with registered profiles
(e.g. DeepSeek, Kimi) bypassed the strip, causing HTTP 400 errors when
image_url content blocks reached their non-vision APIs.

This mirrors the existing behavior in the legacy path, ensuring all
non-vision models get image stripping regardless of profile status.
Vision-capable models are unaffected (the function is a no-op for them).

…events

When /goal loop generates synthetic MessageEvents (goal continuations,
status notices), the reply anchor is unavailable (message_id=None). For
Telegram DM topic lanes, the Telegram adapter requires
direct_messages_topic_id to route messages correctly; without it, the
adapter falls back to message_thread_id=None, sending messages to the
root 'All Messages' thread instead of the active topic lane.

The fix includes direct_messages_topic_id in thread metadata for all
non-General Telegram DM topics, ensuring queued/synthetic messages are
delivered to the correct thread even when no reply anchor exists.

Add creationflags=CREATE_NO_WINDOW to every Windows Popen call
across the terminal, process registry, code execution, and kanban
worker subsystems. Prevents visible CMD windows from flashing on
the user's desktop during agent operation.

Also adds the _IS_WINDOWS module constant to kanban_db.py where
it was missing, for consistency with the other patched files.

5 Popen sites across 4 files:
- tools/environments/local.py (terminal foreground spawn)
- tools/process_registry.py (background process spawn)
- tools/code_execution_tool.py (sandbox + interpreter probe)
- hermes_cli/kanban_db.py (kanban worker spawn)

The Telegram/Discord model picker skipped live model discovery for
custom providers (llama.cpp, Ollama) unless an api_key was configured.
Local providers typically don't require auth on the /models endpoint.

The CLI always probes /models, so this brings the gateway picker into
parity.

Change: `if api_url and api_key:` -> `if api_url:`

The goal judge only receives the goal text and the agent's last
response. It has no concept of the current time, making it
impossible to evaluate time-sensitive goals like 'keep working
until 5pm'.

This commit adds 'Current time' to both JUDGE_USER_PROMPT_TEMPLATE
and JUDGE_USER_PROMPT_WITH_SUBGOALS_TEMPLATE, computed from
datetime.now().astimezone() at judge call time.

Replace generator-based result collection with explicit per-future
handling. Each future is now processed independently with a 600s timeout.

Before: _results.extend(f.result() for f in _futures)
- One exception stops the generator, remaining results are lost
- No timeout: one hung job blocks the entire tick

After: as_completed() + per-future try/except
- Each future handled independently
- 600s timeout prevents indefinite blocking
- Failed futures are logged and counted as failures

… credential leakage

Tests in TestReadClaudeCodeCredentials were not mocking
_read_claude_code_credentials_from_keychain, which was added after the
tests were written. On macOS machines with real Claude Code credentials
stored in the Keychain, the function returns live credentials instead of
the test fixtures, causing assertions to fail and leaking real tokens in
test output.

Add an autouse fixture that stubs the keychain reader to None so all
tests in the class exercise only the file-based credential path.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

The check-windows-footguns.py script outputs a checkmark (U+2713) and
cross (U+2717) to report results. Windows terminals default to cp1252,
which cannot encode these characters, so running the script on Windows
threw a UnicodeEncodeError before any results were printed.

This made the tool completely unusable on the exact platform it exists
to help -- a developer on Windows trying to check their code for
Windows-safety issues would just get a crash instead.

Fix: reconfigure stdout and stderr to UTF-8 at the start of main(),
before any output is produced. Verified on Windows 11 Home with
Python 3.13 (terminal defaulting to cp1252).

…tors

Adds release-note attribution mappings for 9 contributors from group 3:
- @darvsum (PR #26766)
- @hueilau (PR #26498)
- @Timur00Kh (PR #27114)
- @Grogger (PR #27061)
- @lemassykoi (PR #27042)
- @draplater (PR #26707)
- @pr7426 (PR #27048)
- @therahul-yo (PR #26215)
- @flamiinngo (PR #27205)

#27154 dropped from this batch — already landed on main as 4e9cedc.