hyperhive/docs/4-implementation/agent-tools/forge-notify.md

# The forge notification poller

How the daemon that wakes an agent on forge activity works: what it polls, how it formats and de-duplicates a notification, and when it marks one read. The operator-side picture, with the forge's per-agent accounts, is in [the swarm forge](../../2-handbook/swarm/forge.md); the verbs an agent calls are in [`forge.md`](forge.md).

## Notification poller (`hive-forge-notify/src/notify.rs`)

Its own long-running per-agent daemon (`hive-forge-notify`, a sibling of
`hive-bash-daemon` / `hive-matrix-daemon`) — it used
to be a background task inside the `hive-agent` serve loop. Polls
`GET /api/v1/notifications?all=false` every 30 seconds (Forgejo's
unread-only filter), formats each notification as a broker
`Wake { from: "forge" }` message, and delivers it to the agent's own
inbox so claude's normal turn loop picks it up.

The daemon waits about ten minutes for the agent's forge token, then exits 0,
which its `Restart=on-failure` doesn't restart. A path unit
(`hive-forge-notify.path`) starts it again when the fetched token file or the
state-dir `forge-token` changes, so a token minted later still starts the
polling.

The crate builds a second, independent binary for a different host — see
[github.md](github.md#notifications).

The host-specific calls — list unread, mark read, resolve own login —
live behind `Source` in `hive-forge-notify/src/source.rs`;
classification, formatting, dedupe and todo delivery live in `notify.rs`,
common to both binaries. Todo
keys here are the bare thread ids, and must stay that way: renaming them
would orphan every in-flight forge todo on the first restart after a
deploy.

### Mark-read on delivery

On a **successful** broker delivery, `forge_notify` marks the thread
read on forge straight away (`PATCH /notifications/threads/{id}`). The
broker inbox is the durable work queue now — each delivered wake is a
sqlite row with its own ack lifecycle — so the forge unread flag no
longer needs to track whether the agent has _processed_ a
notification. Clearing it on delivery keeps forge's unread set **small
by construction**: at rest it holds only threads that failed to
deliver plus whatever arrived since the last 30s poll.

That size property is the whole point. A container rebuild starts the
poller with no memory of what it delivered, re-scans `?all=false`, and
finds nothing stale — the delivered threads are already read on forge.
Forge's own read-state is thus the durable, cross-rebuild record of
what `forge_notify` has delivered; there is **no persisted cursor**.

**Gotcha:** don't reintroduce a persisted dedup cursor here. A design
that leaves threads unread and tracks delivery via a separately persisted
cursor is fragile — losing that cursor across a rebuild re-delivers the
agent's entire still-unread backlog as a flood of fresh wakes. Forge's
own read-state is the only durable record this design needs.

**Read-before-comment guard doesn't block a fresh wake.** hive-forge's
read-before-comment guard (which keys off forge unread-state) doesn't
force the agent to view a thread before commenting on it: the broker
wake already carries the notification body, so _delivery is the read_.
An agent that wants the full thread still runs `hive-forge comments` /
`view`.

**In-process dedupe (small, ephemeral).** A single-process map (thread
id → last-delivered `updated_at`) guards the narrow window where a
mark-read call _transiently fails_ and the thread reappears unread in
the next poll before its `updated_at` bumps — so a flaky PATCH doesn't
re-fire the wake. it's **not persisted** and resets on restart (forge
read-state covers the durable case). Each poll prunes it to the ids in
the single `limit=UNREAD_FETCH_LIMIT` (50) fetch page, so it can never
exceed that many entries (a debug assertion pins the invariant; the
fetch limit and the bound are the same constant). `forge_notify` leaves
a failed _delivery_ unread and out of the map, so it resurfaces next tick.

`forge_notify` marks self-echo notifications (the agent's own writes, see below)
read directly without a delivery — same `mark_read` call, no wake.

### Activation gates (graceful no-ops)

The poller starts switched off and stays that way for any of:

- `HIVE_FORGE_URL` not set or not parseable as a URL (a hand-run
  harness; hive-c0re sets it from `swarm.forge.domain` on every hive).
- no token in `$HIVE_FORGE_TOKEN_FILE` or `<state>/forge-token` (agent has no forge
  account — pre-provisioning or destroy-without-purge race).
- Initial client construction fails (the typed `forgejo-api` client
  for the API calls, or the plain reqwest client kept for the
  best-effort enrichment fetches of server-provided subject URLs;
  both unlikely; treated as fatal-to-the-task only).

Switched off = the spawned task returns immediately. All other failure
modes (HTTP errors, parse errors, mark-read failures) are
best-effort: logged at debug/warn and retried next tick.

### Self-notification filtering

Forgejo fires notifications for the agent's own actions (it opened a
PR, posted a comment, submitted a review). Surfacing those would
loop claude on its own writes. `forge_notify` drops the comment/review case
silently (mark-read without delivery):

- **Self-authored comments / reviews** — comment payload's
  `user.login` matches `own_login`.
- **Self-authored creations** (an agent opening its own PR/issue) — the
  already-fetched subject payload's poster `user.login` matches
  `own_login`. `forge_notify` drops only _creations_ this way; a later state
  change on the agent's own subject comes from someone else, so it still surfaces.

`forge_notify` fetches `own_login` at startup via `GET /api/v1/user`. On fetch
failure the filter degrades open (no filtering) rather than crashing
the task — a noisy inbox beats a silently stuck poller — but the fetch
is **re-attempted on each poll tick** until it succeeds, so a boot-time
failure (the forge not yet reachable) self-heals instead of leaving
self-echo filtering off for the whole process lifetime.

### Body excerpt + truncation + heading escape

The wake message embeds the comment / review body so the agent sees
actual content without a follow-up fetch — **not** a new issue/PR's own
description, which the wrapper table below deliberately omits. Three
pipeline steps in order:

1. **Truncate** to `BODY_TRUNCATE = 500` chars at a char-boundary;
   appends `…` when cut. Truncation happens BEFORE escape so the
   mention-overflow diff (next step) compares like-for-like against
   the raw body.
2. **Mention overflow extraction** — when truncation actually
   trimmed content, walk the full body line-by-line and surface any
   `@username` lines that fell outside the embed window. Rendered as
   a trailing `mentions (truncated from body):\n  > <line>` block.
   Mention detection requires the `@` to be at line start or
   following a non-username byte, so email-style `foo@bar.com` does
   NOT count.
3. **ATX heading escape** — for each line that's a strict
   `CommonMark` ATX heading (1-6 leading `#`s followed by a space,
   tab, or end-of-line), prepend `\` so the embedded body doesn't
   blow into a top-level h1/h2 inside the wrapper message when the
   dashboard renders it. Lines like `#tag`, `#123`, `#!/bin/bash` <!-- lint:allow: syntax examples, not real tags -->
   **aren't** headings — no escape, no cosmetic noise. Indented
   "headings" inside lists / nested quotes keep their leading
   whitespace.

The strict ATX rule is deliberate: `\#tag` and `#tag` render
identically, so an over-eager escape just adds visual clutter
without changing behavior. Setext-style headings (`title\n====`)
aren't handled — rarer in practice, would need multi-line
lookahead.

### Wrapper format

Five shapes, distinguished by the notification's classification:

| Trigger                             | Wrapper                                                                        |
| ----------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Comment on issue / PR               | `[comment on PR #N owner/repo] title\nurl: ...\n\nauthor: body\nassignee: ...` |
| Review submission                   | `[PR approved #N owner/repo] title\nurl: ...\n\nauthor: body\nassignee: ...`   |
| New issue / PR                      | `[new PR #N owner/repo] title\nurl: ...\nassignee: ...`                        |
| Later activity (open, not creation) | `[activity on PR #N owner/repo] title\nurl: ...\nassignee: ...`                |
| State change                        | `[PR merged #N owner/repo] title\nurl: ...\nassignee: ...`                     |

The issue/PR's own description is deliberately never embedded here (only a
comment/review body is — that's the actual new content a notification
exists to surface): repeating a subject's own description on every "new"
or "activity on" wake for it's noise the agent already has via the URL,
not context (mara, triage: "just the issue title should be enough").

Review labels come from the Forgejo `state` field: `APPROVED` →
`approved`, `REQUEST_CHANGES` → `changes requested`, `COMMENT` →
`review comment`. `forge_notify` drops `PENDING` (review saved but not
submitted yet — no peer-visible event). Unknown states fall back to
the generic comment wrapper.

A review submitted with **no body** renders `reviewed by: <author>` in
place of the `<author>: <body>` line — deliberately worded to not collide
with the meta-suffix `reviewer:` line (requested reviewers, below).

### Inline review comments

A review's line comments belong to neither the review body nor the
`latest_comment_url`. A review with only inline comments has no such url
and would otherwise land as a bare `activity on PR`. Every PR wake therefore
fetches the PR's reviews (`/pulls/N/reviews`, up to four pages of 50) and,
for the reviews new to the agent, appends an
`inline review comments (read them with `hive-forge pr reviews N`):` block
saying where they sit: one `author: path:line, path, ...` line per review
author (bare `path` when Forgejo dropped the position because the line left
the diff; control characters in a path become spaces). The comment text stays
out of the wake, and the agent reads the full review with the CLI.

A review counts as new when it landed strictly after the thread's previously
delivered `updated_at`. Without a baseline every review counts, and so does
one with no submit time, so nothing disappears. It doesn't count when the
agent wrote it, when it's a `PENDING` draft, or when `comments_count` is 0.
The notifier fetches the newest 5 such reviews and lists at most 10 locations
(`(+N more)` for the rest). Best effort: a failed fetch yields less text and
never drops the wake. Cost: one reviews fetch per PR wake, plus one per new
commented review.

### Merge/close vs a later comment

A notification carrying a `latest_comment_url` normally takes the comment
path. But a merged/closed subject **keeps** its `latest_comment_url` set,
so a just-merged PR that had any prior discussion would route to the
comment path and render `[comment on PR]` (with a stale pre-merge comment
body) instead of `[PR merged]` — the agent never learns its PR merged.
When the notification IS the merge/close transition — its
event time (`updated_at`) is within `NEW_ITEM_TOLERANCE_SECS` of the
subject's `closed_at` (set for both `merged` and `closed`) — the
state-change path wins even with a comment url present
(`state_change_is_current`). A genuine **later** comment on an
already-closed subject bumps `updated_at` well past `closed_at`, so it
stays on the comment path and keeps its comment body. Missing/unparseable
timestamps default to the state-change path, so a merge is never silently
hidden behind a stale comment.

#### Merge racing a comment

The one gap the timestamp cut leaves: a genuine comment posted **within
`NEW_ITEM_TOLERANCE_SECS` of the merge** bumps `updated_at` close enough
to `closed_at` that `state_change_is_current` returns `true` — so it takes
the state-change path, dropping its body. Best of both worlds:
on the merge/close path `forge_notify` fetches the `latest_comment_url` comment and, when
its `created_at` is strictly **after** the subject's `closed_at`
(`comment_is_after_close`) — in other words, it raced the merge rather than being the
pre-merge last comment the subject keeps — append it as a
`comment by <author>: <excerpt>` block before the meta suffix
(`fresh_post_close_comment_tail`). The wake carries **both** `[PR merged]`
and the racing comment. `forge_notify` leaves the kept pre-merge comment (created before
`closed_at`) off, drops a self-authored racing comment (don't
echo the agent's own write), and appends nothing for a missing/unparseable `created_at`/
`closed_at` (conservative — only surface a comment it can
positively place after the close). Cost: one extra comment fetch on
merge/close notifications, acceptable given how rare they are.

### "new" vs "activity on"

A review submitted with **no body** carries no `latest_comment_url`,
so it misses the comment path and lands on the state-change path with
`state == "open"` — exactly like a freshly opened PR. Labeling that
`new PR` is misleading: agents dismiss it as a duplicate of the
original open notification and miss the review. The `open`
state only earns the `new <kind>` label when the notification's event
time (`updated_at`) is within `NEW_ITEM_TOLERANCE_SECS` (120s) of the
subject's `created_at`. `forge_notify` labels anything later `activity on <kind>`
— neutral and non-misleading, since it can't cheaply say _what_ the
activity was without an extra reviews fetch. Missing/unparseable
timestamps default to `new` (preserve prior behavior rather than mask a
genuine new item). A small dependency-free
RFC 3339 helper (`parse_rfc3339`) parses timestamps.

`forge_notify` extracts the number from `subject.html_url`'s last path segment
(strips `#anchor` first), and the repo slug from `repository.full_name`.
Both degrade gracefully when absent (number → blank, repo → blank)
so unexpected Forgejo shapes don't crash the formatter.

### Meta suffix

Every wrapper ends with one or more of:

- `assignee: <list>` — always present; `unassigned` when empty so
  the line shape is stable.
- `reviewer: <list>` — PR notifications only, present only when
  `requested_reviewers` is non-empty.

### Review-request override

For new PRs, the kind label flips to `[review requested #N
owner/repo]` when `own_login` appears in `requested_reviewers`,
regardless of the Forgejo `reason` field. Forgejo doesn't reliably
set `reason == "review_requested"` (often null instead), so the
fallback checks the subject payload directly. `is_new` gates detection
so the label only fires once on PR creation, not on every
subsequent comment.

### Subscription management

The poller does **not** autounsubscribe from repo watches — it
delivers every unread notification it's handed. A hive-forge CLI
subscription verb bounds the firehose explicitly (dropping broad repo
watches an agent doesn't need) — the poller never guesses which
watches to drop. See the `subscription` verb in
[`docs/4-implementation/agent-tools/forge.md`](forge.md).