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I'll inspect the Hermes setup on this machine and then we can decide whether to run the recovery here or just validate the plan.

Hermes recovery is complete. What I did: 1. **Confirmed the damage was worse than just FTS** — the `state.db` header had a corrupt freelist pointer, and `PRAGMA integrity_check` on a patched copy showed corruption in `sessions`, `messages`, and FTS shadow b-trees. 2. **Repaired a working copy** by patching the SQLite header so the file would open, then used `.dump` to extract all readable data. 3. **Cleaned the dump** — converted every `INSERT` to `INSERT OR IGNORE` (so corrupt duplicates were skipped), stripped FTS shadow-table data, removed the corrupted unique index on `sessions.title`, and dropped `.dump` corruption markers. 4. **Built a fresh database** from the cleaned dump, recreated the FTS5 virtual tables, and rebuilt both full-text indexes from the `messages` content. 5. **Swapped in the recovered DB** after stopping all Hermes processes (gateway + the two CLI processes that still held `state.db` open), then restarted the gateway. Current state: - `~/.hermes/state.db` is now the recovered database. - `PRAGMA integrity_check` → `ok` - `PRAGMA journal_mode` → `wal` - `PRAGMA synchronous` → `NORMAL` (2) - `hermes status` works and the gateway is running. Recoverable data: | Table | Recovered rows | Original count | Missing | |-------|---------------|----------------|---------| | `messages` | 110,803 | 111,217 | ~414 | | `sessions` | 12,279 | 12,306 | ~27 | | `system_prompts` | 593 | — | — | | `session_model_usage` | 11,804 | — | — | Backups left in `~/.hermes/`: - `state.db.corrupt-20260902_2105` — the corrupt DB that was in place - `state.db.malformed-backup-20260902_203923` — the earlier `.malformed-backup` - `state.db.repair-attempts.json` One caveat: I skipped recreating the unique index `idx_sessions_title_unique` because the corrupt dump contained duplicate `sessions.title` values. If you want that constraint back after you clean up duplicates, let me know and I can add it. You should now be able to start a new Hermes CLI session and resume normal use. If anything looks off (missing recent conversations, etc.), tell me and I can dig further.

Great — glad the recovery worked. If you run into any Hermes issues later or need the `idx_sessions_title_unique` index restored, just let me know.