Hallucinated 'silence' tokens (*(silent)*, _silent_, the bare '.', '...',
'silent', no response/reply, the mute emoji) are emitted when a persona has
nothing actionable to say. In bot-to-bot channels the receiving bot mirrors
the token back, creating a tight loop that burns API tokens and can crash a
model with 'no content after all retries'. SOUL.md/prompt rules drift across
providers and have already failed in practice, so add a substrate-level guard.
_deliver_to_platform now drops a message whose finalized content is only a
silence-narration token, logs a WARNING with platform/chat_id/truncated
content, and returns {success: True, filtered: 'silence_narration',
delivered: False} instead of calling the adapter. Single chokepoint covers
every platform adapter; the regex is anchored start/end with a 64-char guard
so prose like 'Silence is golden — here is the plan...' or 'Silent install
completed' is never dropped. Local/file delivery is a separate path and is
left untouched. Opt out via gateway.filter_silence_narration: false or the
HERMES_FILTER_SILENCE_NARRATION env override (env wins when set).
Closes#34616
45bc65abbe