The docs site (Vercel) serves /docs/api/model-catalog.json behind a bot
mitigation rule that returns HTTP 403 + x-vercel-mitigated: challenge for
non-browser User-Agents — including urllib (what the CLI uses) and curl.
When that happens, get_catalog() falls back to the stale disk cache and
new model releases (Opus 4.8, etc.) never reach the /model picker even
though they're already in OPENROUTER_MODELS and the live OpenRouter API.
Adds a fallback URL chain: when the primary catalog URL fails, walk
DEFAULT_CATALOG_FALLBACK_URLS — currently the raw.githubusercontent.com
copy of the same file. GitHub raw doesn't bot-gate, so the manifest stays
reachable through Vercel firewall hiccups. Per-provider override URLs
keep their direct-fetch semantics (operators configure those specifically,
no implicit fallback).
Also swaps stepfun/step-3.5-flash for stepfun/step-3.7-flash in the
OpenRouter + Nous Portal curated picker lists. Native stepfun provider
configuration (api.stepfun.ai) is left alone — that depends on what
stepfun.ai itself serves, not what OpenRouter routes.
Test plan: 5 new TestFallbackChain tests cover primary-success,
primary-failure-fallback-success, all-fail, primary==fallback-dedup, and
end-to-end get_catalog routing through the new helper. Existing 23 tests
in test_model_catalog.py still pass (28 total). Wider tests/hermes_cli/
sweep: 5701/5701 pass.