The kanban-worker and kanban-orchestrator bundled skills existed only to
be force-loaded into dispatcher-spawned workers, gated by
environments:[kanban] so they wouldn't leak into normal CLI listings.
That gating was fragile (the leak that #50443 patched) and the
--skills auto-load was already best-effort — most workers ran without it
because the bundled skill isn't present in profile-scoped skills dirs.
Remove the skills entirely and promote their load-bearing content
(workspace kinds, deliverable artifacts, created-card integrity, profile
discovery) into KANBAN_GUIDANCE, which is already injected into every
kanban worker's system prompt. Net result: every worker reliably gets
the guidance, nothing can leak into a CLI/blank-slate session, and the
gating machinery is gone.
- agent/prompt_builder.py: promote the 4 load-bearing rules into KANBAN_GUIDANCE
- hermes_cli/kanban_db.py: drop --skills kanban-worker auto-injection + _kanban_worker_skill_available probe
- hermes_cli/kanban_swarm.py: drop skills=[kanban-orchestrator] on the root card
- hermes_cli/kanban.py: drop kanban-init skill seeding; fix help text
- delete skills/devops/kanban-{worker,orchestrator}
- docs: delete the two skill pages (EN+zh), fix sidebars/catalog/kanban.md/kanban-worker-lanes.md and the video-orchestrator + codex-lane references
- tests: update spawn-argv expectations; re-bound the guidance-size guard
Supersedes the skill-leak half of #50443 (credit @helix4u for flagging the area).
Two small bugs in the kanban dispatcher's CLI surface that were
silently degrading two distinct workflows. Bundled because the test
files and the surrounding code surface overlap.
## #33488: hermes kanban dispatch ignored kanban.max_in_progress / max_spawn
The CLI wrapper in hermes_cli/kanban.py:_cmd_dispatch only passed
default_assignee and max_in_progress_per_profile through to
dispatch_once. The global concurrency cap (kanban.max_in_progress)
and the per-tick spawn limit (kanban.max_spawn) were silently dropped,
so operators using 'hermes kanban dispatch' as a one-shot or in a
custom loop couldn't reach either cap from config — only the gateway
embedded dispatcher honored them.
Fix: read both keys from config in the same coerce-positive-int
helper that already handled max_in_progress_per_profile. CLI --max
still wins over config kanban.max_spawn when both are present
(explicit operator signal beats default), but absent --max falls
back to config.
## #29415: synthesizer crashed in retry loop on missing skill
hermes_cli/kanban_swarm.py:212 hardcoded skills=['avoid-ai-writing'],
a skill that doesn't exist in the bundled skills/ directory or any
registered hub source. Every synthesizer worker spawn failed at CLI
startup with 'Unknown skill(s): avoid-ai-writing' before the agent
loop even started — the dispatcher retried up to failure_limit
(default 2), then auto-blocked the task, then dependency rules could
re-promote it, looping forever until manual intervention.
Fix: replace with 'humanizer' which is bundled at
skills/creative/humanizer/SKILL.md (description: 'Humanize text:
strip AI-isms and add real voice'). That's the obvious intent behind
the 'avoid-ai-writing' name, and the skill is platform-portable
(linux/macos/windows) so it works on every supported runtime.
## Tests
tests/hermes_cli/test_kanban_cli_dispatch_passthrough.py — 4 cases:
- CLI passes max_in_progress / max_spawn / default_assignee /
max_in_progress_per_profile from config to dispatch_once
- CLI --max flag overrides config kanban.max_spawn
- Invalid cap values (0, -1, 'abc', '1.5') silently fall through to None
- kanban_swarm.py no longer references 'avoid-ai-writing' AND the
replacement 'humanizer' skill exists at the expected on-disk path
Kanban suite: 468/468 pass (was 464; +4 new regression tests).
Salvages #26791 by @Niraven. Adds 'hermes kanban swarm' to create a
durable Kanban Swarm v1 graph: a completed root/blackboard card,
parallel worker cards, a verifier gated on all workers, and a
synthesizer gated on the verifier. Stores shared swarm blackboard
updates as structured JSON comments on the root card.
Self-contained: new hermes_cli/kanban_swarm.py module + CLI wiring +
unit tests.
