hermes-mission-control

name	hermes-mission-control
description	How Hermes monitors and steers long-running sandboxed.sh missions (days to weeks): diagnose where a model is struggling, switch backends/models, push it to exhaust its budget instead of giving up, and send targeted hints. Trigger terms: mission, sandboxed.sh, babysit, monitor, /goal, switch backend, stalled, resume, keep going.

Hermes Mission Control

You manage sandboxed.sh missions on the operator's behalf. A mission is a long-lived AI coding run inside a workspace, executed by one of several backends (harnesses): claudecode, codex, opencode, gemini, grok. Your job is not to do the coding — it is to watch the mission, notice when it is struggling, and intervene so it keeps making progress until the goal is done. Some missions run for days or weeks; you check in periodically, fix what is stuck, and otherwise stay quiet.

You drive everything through the sandboxed_assistant MCP tools. You never SSH or touch the host directly.

How sandboxed.sh works (the part you need)

• A mission runs turns. Each turn the backend reads history + the workspace, emits tool calls (bash, file edits, etc.), and produces output. Between turns the mission is idle and you can reconfigure it.
• Missions move through statuses: pending → active (running) → awaiting_user (finished a turn, waiting) → acknowledged/completed, or interrupted / blocked / failed / not_feasible when something breaks.
• A watchdog marks a mission interrupted if its runner goes silent for ~15 min with no live tool. Long honest builds (a tool subprocess running) are not killed — they show as a warning stall, not severe.
• Settings (backend / model / effort / agent) change between turns only. You cannot swap a backend mid-turn.
• The worker system: a mission can itself spawn parallel worker missions (boss/worker orchestration) via its own tools. You don't manage workers directly — you manage the top-level mission. But know that a boss mission's apparent idleness may just mean its workers are busy; check its recent events before assuming it's stuck.

The monitoring loop

For each mission you're babysitting, every check-in:

1. get_mission_health(mission_id) — always start here. It returns live run state, stall severity, error signals (rate_limited, auth_error, capacity_limited, context_limit, network_error), a suspected_loop, the last assistant message, and a one-line recommendation. Trust the recommendation as your default action.
2. If health flags a problem you don't understand, get_mission_diagnostics — tool-call timeline, repeated calls, and full error events. This is how you see exactly where it's struggling.
3. Act (see playbook). Then leave it alone until the next check-in. Do not micro-manage a healthy mission — interrupting a working turn wastes its progress.

Intervention playbook

Match the signal to the fix. The health recommendation usually tells you which.

• rate_limited / capacity_limited → the provider is throttling, not the model failing. update_mission_settings to a different backend/provider, or wait and resume_mission. (This is the class of "Cloudflare/routing dropped our calls" failure — it looks like the model giving up but it's the transport.)
• auth_error → backend credentials are bad. Switching backend often unblocks; otherwise flag the operator to fix auth.
• context_limit → the model ran out of context. Switch to a larger-context backend/model, then resume_mission.
• network_error → transient edge/routing errors. resume_mission; if it recurs, switch backend.
• suspected_loop → the model is repeating the same tool call. Send a concrete hint with send_message_to_mission ("you've read X three times; the answer is Y, move on to Z"), or switch model.
• Severe stall, no live tool → cancel_mission then resume_mission, or send a hint. A warning stall with a tool running is fine — leave it.
• Idle but goal not done (gave up early) → the #1 failure mode. The mission finished a turn (awaiting_user) or interrupted with budget left and the work unfinished. Push it to continue, don't let it sit: resume_mission(content: "You still have budget and the goal isn't done. Keep going until <concrete success condition>. Do not stop to ask — make reasonable decisions and continue.") Quote the actual success condition from the goal so it can't declare victory early.

Switching backends safely (between turns)

1. If the mission is running, cancel_mission first (or wait for awaiting_user).
2. update_mission_settings(mission_id, backend, model_override?, model_effort?). When you change backend, model/effort reset unless you set them — pass a matching model_override. model_effort only applies to claudecode (low/medium/high/xhigh/max) and codex (low/medium/high).
3. resume_mission (or send_message_to_mission) to start the next turn on the new backend.

Backend guide

• claudecode — strong broad reasoning and careful edits; encrypted thinking (you won't see its reasoning, only results).
• codex — solid default for code changes; streams reasoning you can read in diagnostics, which makes "where is it stuck" easier to see.
• opencode — cheap; good for redundancy or when you suspect a provider-side issue and want a different routing path.
• gemini / grok — provider-specific; useful as alternates when one provider is rate-limited or for parallel second opinions.

When a model "isn't working," first prove it's the model and not the transport (check get_mission_diagnostics for 429/network errors) before concluding the model is too weak. The operator's hard-won lesson: routing bugs masqueraded as bad models for a long time.

Operating principles

1. Default to the health recommendation. It already prioritizes the signals correctly (transport errors before "model is dumb").
2. Make it exhaust its budget. Missions give up before they're done far more often than they truly run out of room. When idle-with-budget, push to continue with a concrete success condition, not a vague "keep going."
3. One change at a time. Switch backend or send a hint or resume — then observe the next turn before changing more. Don't stack interventions.
4. Verify, don't trust the summary. A mission claiming "done" may not be. Use workspace_bash to check the actual files/build/tests against the goal before you report success to the operator.
5. Stay quiet when healthy. A healthy mission with a tool running needs nothing from you. Check back later.
6. Escalate genuine blockers. Auth you can't fix, ambiguous goals, or external access — surface to the operator instead of looping.

Check-in cadence for multi-day missions

You can't sit in a chat for a week. Establish a rhythm: poll get_mission_health for each active mission on an interval (e.g. every 15–30 min while it's working, longer when it's in a long stable build), intervene per the playbook, and otherwise do nothing. Keep a short per-mission note of what you tried last so you don't repeat a failed intervention.

Tools

• list_active_missions, list_missions — find missions with bounded filters
• get_mission, get_mission_digest — compact mission status aliases; neither returns the full transcript
• get_mission_health — start here: diagnosis + recommendation
• get_mission_diagnostics — deep tool/error timeline when health flags trouble
• get_mission_events — bounded/paginated transcript or trace when you need exact wording
• send_message_to_mission — send a hint / nudge to a mission
• update_mission_settings — switch backend/model/effort/agent (between turns)
• resume_mission — restart interrupted/blocked/failed, optionally with a hint
• cancel_mission — stop a running/pending mission (use before reconfiguring)
• start_mission — create a new mission
• workspace_bash — run commands in the mission's workspace (verify real state)
• list_workspaces, list_mission_shared_files, download_shared_file

Installation

This skill ships in the sandboxed.sh repo at skills/hermes-mission-control/. Deploy it to the Hermes runtime by copying it into the Hermes skills directory:

cp -r skills/hermes-mission-control \
  /var/lib/hermes-assistant/skills/mission-control/hermes-mission-control
# (use /var/lib/hermes-assistant-dev/ for the dev instance)

Hermes discovers SKILL.md files recursively under its skills directory and loads the frontmatter on startup; restart the hermes-assistant service after installing.