The 'summoning hermes…' phase blocked on gateway.ready, which ran MCP
tool discovery inline. Any configured-but-unreachable MCP server burned
its full connect-retry backoff (1+2+4s ≈ 7s) before the composer
appeared — startup went from instant to ~7.5s of dead air for anyone
with a down stdio/http server in mcp_servers.
Move discovery into a background daemon thread so gateway.ready fires
immediately; tools register into the shared registry as servers connect,
and the agent isn't built until the first prompt. Measured spawn→ready:
~7500ms → ~115ms (dead twozero_td server in config).
Also drop rich.console + prompt_toolkit off banner.py's import path
(lazy-imported inside cprint/build_welcome_banner). tui_gateway.server
imports banner only to reach the lightweight prefetch_update_check
helper; the eager rich/pt imports added ~45ms before gateway.ready for
no benefit. tui_gateway.server import: ~115ms → ~69ms.
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