* feat(goals): add /goal wait <pid> barrier to park the loop on a background process
The /goal loop re-pokes the agent every turn via the post-turn judge. When a
goal is gated on a long-running background process (CI poller, build, test
matrix, deploy) that produces nothing to judge yet, this spins the agent into
'is it done?' busy-work and burns the turn budget.
/goal wait <pid> [reason] parks the loop: while the PID is alive, the judge is
skipped, no turn is consumed, no continuation fires, and /goal status shows a
parked indicator. The barrier auto-clears the moment the process exits (the
agent's notify_on_complete watcher is the natural wake signal), then the next
turn resumes normal judging. /goal unwait clears it manually; pause/resume/clear
drop it; a dead/stale PID can never wedge the loop.
Wired across CLI, gateway, and the mid-run command guard for parity. Barrier
persists in SessionDB.state_meta (survives /resume); GoalState gains
backward-compatible waiting_on_pid/waiting_reason/waiting_since fields. 12 new
tests; docs updated.
* fix(goals): use gateway.status._pid_exists for liveness, not os.kill(pid,0)
The Windows-footguns CI guard flagged os.kill(pid, 0) in _pid_alive — on
Windows that's not a no-op, it routes to CTRL_C_EVENT and hard-kills the
target's console process group (bpo-14484). Delegate to the canonical
footgun-safe gateway.status._pid_exists (psutil + ctypes/POSIX fallback)
instead, with a direct-psutil last resort.
* feat(goals): judge-driven auto-wait — the loop parks itself, no manual /goal wait
Makes the wait barrier automatic. Every turn the judge is shown the agent's
live background processes (pid, command, uptime, output tail from the
process_registry) alongside the goal + response, and can return a new 'wait'
verdict instead of continue:
{"verdict":"wait","wait_on_pid":N} → park until that process exits
{"verdict":"wait","wait_for_seconds":N} → park until the deadline passes
evaluate_after_turn acts on the directive (sets the barrier, parks the loop)
so the agent isn't re-poked into busy-work while CI/builds/deploys run. Adds a
time-based waiting_until barrier alongside the pid barrier; both auto-clear and
can never wedge the loop. Drivers (CLI, gateway, tui_gateway) feed the live
registry in via gather_background_processes(). Manual /goal wait stays as an
override. Judge verdict contract widened to (verdict, reason, parse_failed,
wait_directive); legacy {"done":bool} shape still accepted.
* test(goals): update kanban _fake_judge to the 4-tuple judge contract
CI test(3) caught it: test_kanban_goal_mode's _fake_judge still returned the
3-tuple (verdict, reason, parse_failed), but the kanban loop now unpacks the
4-tuple (+ wait_directive). Update the fake to return None for the directive
and accept the background_processes kwarg.
* feat(goals): trigger-based wait — park on a process's own signal, not just exit
Addresses two gaps in the judge-driven wait: (1) the judge could only express
'wait until PID exits' or 'wait N seconds', so a long-lived watcher/server that
fires a trigger MID-RUN (and may never exit) couldn't be waited on; (2) the
process's own watch_patterns/notify_on_complete trigger was invisible to the judge.
Adds a session-based barrier (waiting_on_session) that releases on the process's
OWN trigger via process_registry.is_session_waiting(): the session exits, OR (if
started with watch_patterns) its pattern matches — even while the process keeps
running. list_sessions() now surfaces session_id + watch_patterns/watch_hit/
notify_on_complete so the judge sees the trigger and is told to prefer
wait_on_session for trigger processes. Judge verdict gains a {wait_on_session}
directive (preferred over pid). Backward-compatible GoalState field; pid + time
barriers unchanged.
Tests: TestSessionTriggerBarrier (release on mid-run pattern match while alive,
release on exit, unknown-session, full park→trigger→resume, parse, validation,
backcompat load). 105 goal-surface + 85 process_registry tests green.
* Revert "fix(goals): force judge to use tool calls instead of JSON-text replies (#23547)"
This reverts commit a63a2b7c78.
* Revert "fix(goals): forward standing /goal state on auto-compression session rotation (#23530)"
This reverts commit 4a080b1d5a.
* Revert "feat(goals): /goal checklist + /subgoal user controls (#23456)"
This reverts commit 404640a2b7.
* feat(goals): /goal checklist + /subgoal user controls
Two-phase judge for /goal — Phase A decomposes the goal into a detailed
checklist on first turn; Phase B evaluates each pending item harshly
against the agent's most recent response. The goal completes only when
every item is in a terminal status (completed or impossible). Adds
/subgoal so the user can append, complete, mark impossible, undo,
remove, or clear items the judge missed or got wrong.
Mechanics:
- GoalState gains `checklist` and `decomposed` fields, both backwards
compatible (old state_meta rows load unchanged).
- Phase A: aux call writes a harsh, exhaustive checklist; biased toward
more items not fewer. Falls through to legacy freeform judge when
decompose fails.
- Phase B: judge gets the checklist + last-response snippet + path to
a per-session conversation dump at <HERMES_HOME>/goals/<sid>.json.
A bounded read_file tool (max 5 calls per turn, restricted to that
one file) lets the judge inspect history when the snippet is
ambiguous. Stickiness in code: terminal items are frozen, only the
user can revert via /subgoal undo.
- Continuation prompt shows checklist progress when non-empty;
reverts to old prompt when empty.
- Status line shows M/N done counts.
CLI + gateway + TUI gateway all pass the agent reference into
evaluate_after_turn so the dump can be written. Gateway-side
/subgoal is allowed mid-run since it only modifies the checklist
the judge consults at turn boundaries.
Tests: 24 new cases — backcompat round-trip, Phase A decompose,
Phase B updates + new_items + stickiness, user override flows,
conversation dump (incl. unsafe-sid sanitization), judge read_file
restriction. Existing freeform-mode tests updated to patch the
renamed `judge_goal_freeform` and skip Phase A explicitly.
* fix(goals): off-by-one in judge index, message-list plumbing, prompt tuning
Three live-test findings from running /goal end-to-end against
gemini-3-flash-preview as the judge:
1. Off-by-one bug — the judge sees the checklist rendered with 1-based
indices ('1. [ ] foo, 2. [ ] bar') but the apply layer indexed
state.checklist as 0-based. Result: every judge update landed on
the wrong item, evidence got attached to neighbouring rows, and
the genuine 'first pending' item (usually #1) never got marked.
Fix: convert 1 → 0 in _parse_evaluate_response. Also tightened the
user prompt to call out the 1-based scheme explicitly. New tests
cover the parser conversion + an end-to-end fake-judge round-trip.
2. Conversation dump never happened — _extract_agent_messages tried
common AIAgent attribute names (.messages, .conversation_history,
etc.) but AIAgent doesn't expose the message list as an instance
attribute; it lives inside run_conversation()'s scope. Result: the
judge's read_file tool always saw history_path=unavailable. Fix:
added an explicit messages= kwarg to evaluate_after_turn that all
three call sites (CLI, gateway, TUI gateway) now pass directly.
Agent-attribute extraction kept as back-compat fallback.
3. Prompt was too harsh on simple goals. The original 'be HARSH,
default to leaving items pending' wording made the judge refuse
to mark 'file exists' completed even after the agent ran ls,
test -f, os.path.isfile, and find — burning the entire 8-turn
budget on a fizzbuzz task. Softened to 'strict but not absurd'
with explicit guidance on what counts as evidence and a directive
not to require re-proving items already established earlier.
Re-tested live with the same fizzbuzz goal: now terminates in 2
turns with all 8 checklist items correctly attributed to their
own evidence. /subgoal user-action flow (add / complete / undo /
impossible) verified live as well.
Weak judge models (e.g. deepseek-v4-flash) return empty strings or prose
when asked for the strict {done, reason} JSON verdict. The old code
failed-open to continue on every such turn, burning the entire turn
budget with log lines like
judge returned empty response
judge reply was not JSON: "Let me analyze whether the goal..."
and /goal clear could not stop it mid-loop without /stop.
After N=3 consecutive *parse* failures (transport/API errors don't
count — those are transient), the loop auto-pauses and prints:
⏸ Goal paused — the judge model (3 turns) isn't returning the
required JSON verdict. Route the judge to a stricter model in
~/.hermes/config.yaml:
auxiliary:
goal_judge:
provider: openrouter
model: google/gemini-3-flash-preview
Then /goal resume to continue.
The counter resets on any usable reply (both "done"/"continue" and
API errors) and persists across GoalManager reloads so cross-session
resumes carry the correct state.
Also fixes test_goal_verdict_send.py sharing a hardcoded session_id
across tests — the shared id only worked because the previous
_post_turn_goal_continuation was a never-awaited coroutine. Now that
PR #19160 made it properly awaited, the xdist test-leakage bug
surfaced. Each test gets a unique session_id via uuid suffix.
/goal was silently broken outside the classic CLI.
TUI: /goal was routed through the HermesCLI slash-worker subprocess,
which set the goal row in SessionDB but then called
_pending_input.put(state.goal) — the subprocess has no reader for that
queue, so the kickoff message was discarded. No post-turn judge was
wired into prompt.submit either, so even a manual kickoff would not
continue the goal loop. Intercept /goal in command.dispatch instead,
drive GoalManager directly, and return {type: send, notice, message}
so the TUI client renders the Goal-set notice and fires the kickoff.
Run the judge in _run_prompt_submit after message.complete, surface
the verdict via status.update {kind: goal}, and chain the continuation
turn after the running guard is released.
Gateway: _post_turn_goal_continuation was gated on
hasattr(adapter, 'send_message'), but adapters only expose send().
That branch was dead on every platform — users never saw
'✓ Goal achieved', 'Continuing toward goal', or budget-exhausted
messages. Replace the dead call with adapter.send(chat_id, content,
metadata) and drop a broken reference to self._loop.
Tests:
- tests/tui_gateway/test_goal_command.py — full /goal dispatch matrix
(set / status / pause / resume / clear / stop / done / whitespace)
plus regressions for slash.exec → 4018 and 'goal' staying in
_PENDING_INPUT_COMMANDS.
- tests/gateway/test_goal_verdict_send.py — locks in the adapter.send
path for done / continue / budget-exhausted and verifies the hook
no-ops when no goal is set or the adapter lacks send().
