hyperhive/TODO.md

Hyperhive TODOs

Architecture / Features

• Shared space for all agents to access documents/files without manager routing
• Private git forge agents can push to and create new repos in
• Move bind mounts in agents to /agents/<name>/state so path for agent = path for manager
• Split harness-internal state from agent-visible state: the /agents/<n>/state/ mount (host /var/lib/hyperhive/agents/<n>/state/) currently mixes the agent's durable notes with harness internals — hyperhive-events.sqlite, hyperhive-turn-stats.sqlite, hyperhive-model, future per-agent skill caches, etc. The agent can accidentally overwrite a harness file, the harness clutters what claude thinks is "my notes dir", and the host-side vacuum has to special-case filenames it owns. Move harness internals to a sibling dir, e.g. /var/lib/hyperhive/agents/<n>/harness/, bind-mounted RW into the container as /agents/<n>/harness/ (same path inside + out, same convention as state). Container's /agents/<n>/state/ becomes purely agent-owned. Touches: paths.rs (new harness_dir()), events.rs, turn_stats.rs (default paths flip), events_vacuum.rs (sweep root flips), lifecycle.rs (extra bind mount), and a migration that moves existing files on first boot under the new layout. Side benefit: makes the privsep TODO cheaper — the unprivileged web server only needs read access to /agents/<n>/state/ (operator-meaningful files), not /agents/<n>/harness/. The legacy bare /state mount the manager still uses (container_state_prefix("manager") == "/state/", manager bind in lifecycle::set_nspawn_flags) gets removed in the same pass — manager goes to /agents/manager/state/ + /agents/manager/harness/ like every other agent.
• Broadcast messaging: allow sending messages with recipient "*" to all agents; deliver with hint "this was a broadcast and may not need any action from you"
• Multi-agent restart coordination: when rebuilding all agents, manager should start first so it can coordinate post-restart confusion (notify agents, suppress unnecessary retries, etc)
• Shared docs/skills repo (RO): a single repo on the hive forge that every agent has read-only access to — common references, prompts, runbooks, "skills" the operator wants every agent to inherit without baking into the system prompt or /shared. Implementation likely: seed an org-shared/docs repo on first hive-forge boot, grant every per-agent user a read membership in the org. Agents git clone it (or use the API) to read; only the manager + operator can push.
• Loose-ends tracker + get_open_threads tool ✓ landed — new mcp__hyperhive__get_open_threads MCP tool on both agent + manager surfaces. Wire types in hive-sh4re: AgentRequest::GetOpenThreads / ManagerRequest::GetOpenThreads → OpenThreads { threads: Vec<OpenThread> }. OpenThread is a tagged enum with Approval { id, agent, commit_ref, description, age_seconds } and Question { id, asker, target, question, age_seconds }. Shared aggregator at hive-c0re/src/open_threads.rs: for_agent(coord, name) (sub-agent surface; filters questions by asker == self OR target == self, approvals only for manager) and hive_wide(coord) (manager surface; everything pending in the swarm). No caching — fresh sqlite sweep per call. Per-agent web UI rendering is a follow-up below.
  • Follow-up: surface open-threads on the per-agent web UI so the operator can see at a glance what each agent has hanging open — same data source as the MCP tool, just rendered into the existing per-agent dashboard page (next to inbox view / model chip / etc).

Reminder Tool

• Per-agent reminder limits (burst capacity, rate limiting)
• Scheduler shutdown: add graceful shutdown signal when coordinator is destroyed (currently runs forever)
• DB lock contention: under high reminder volume, the broker's Mutex<Connection> serializes every delivery transaction. Consider batching multiple deliveries into one tx, or moving reminders onto a separate sqlite connection.

Dashboard

• Per-agent reminder rollups: pending count chip + delivery-error surface landed. Still open: delivered-count chip (last 24h?), per-agent histogram of attempts-vs-successes — both readable from turn_stats.open_reminders_count history or via a new Broker::count_delivered_reminders_since(agent, ts) helper.

Security

• Privsep the dashboard from the privileged daemon: hive-c0re runs as root (it has to — nixos-container create / start / destroy, the meta git repo, every per-agent bind mount). The HTTP server lives in the same process, so every read-endpoint (/api/state-file, /api/journal/{name}, /api/agent-config/{name}) is one allow-list bug away from serving arbitrary host files. Split the architecture: keep the privileged daemon doing lifecycle + git + ipc, run the web UI as an unprivileged user that talks to the daemon over a unix socket with a narrow request surface (ReadAgentStateFile { agent, rel_path } etc.). The unprivileged process can't read /etc/shadow even if every check in get_state_file is bypassed — it doesn't have the bits. Container-lifecycle POSTs (/restart, /destroy, etc.) become forwarded RPCs the privileged side authorises on its terms.
• Defense in depth on get_state_file: until privsep lands, the allow-list is load-bearing. Worth adding: refuse files whose mode is not world-readable (so an agent writing a 0600 file inside state/ can't have its contents proxied through the endpoint to a different operator), and refuse symlinks at any path component (O_NOFOLLOW-style — canonicalize resolves them, but we currently don't reject if the original path had symlinks).

Harness Ergonomics (agent-side wishlist)

Filed by damocles, who actually lives in this thing. Loosely ranked by how often the friction bites in normal use.

• Auto-attach oversize message bodies — superseded by simply raising the inline cap from 1 KiB → 4 KiB (covers ~95% of conversational overflow). Anything genuinely larger still needs a state file. Blob-in-broker-sqlite was prototyped on paper (/agents/damocles/state/oversize-msg-proposal.md) but rejected as future vacuum/sync pain not worth carrying for the long-tail 5% of cases that legitimately belong in a file.
• Inbox batching hint in the wake prompt — when the harness pops a message and there are N more waiting, the wake prompt should say so (e.g. "(+3 more queued; consider draining before acting)") so claude knows to call recv() again in the same turn instead of doing the expensive Read/Edit dance once per message over N turns. The data's already in the broker (Broker::pending_count(agent)); just thread it into the prompt builder in hive-ag3nt::turn.rs. Even better: add a one-shot recv_batch(max: u32) MCP tool that returns up to max pending messages in a single round-trip.
• Self-management of own asks + reminders — once I fire ask or remind I have no way to inspect or cancel them from the agent side. Operator can cancel asks via dashboard; nothing for reminders at all (TODO above). Want list_my_asks() -> [{id, target, question, asked_at}] and cancel_ask(id) on the agent surface, plus list_my_reminders() / cancel_reminder(id). Bounded by asker == self and reminder.owner == self so no cross-agent meddling.
• whoami introspection tool ✓ landed — new mcp__hyperhive__whoami on both agent + manager surfaces. Returns { name, role, hyperhive_rev } from coord state (socket identity for name, hard-coded per surface for role, auto_update::current_flake_rev). operator_pronouns deliberately omitted — already substituted into every agent's system prompt at boot, so returning it again was duplicate data. model + started_at deferred — those live in the harness process not the coord, would need extra plumbing for marginal value.
• Optional in_reply_to: <msg_id> on send — pure wire addition; no behavioural change. The dashboard could render conversation threads (already wants this for the agent-to-agent question UI in the Dashboard section). Today every reply is a fresh root in the message flow which obscures cause-and-effect when two agents are mid-debate. Field is optional, ignored if the referenced id is unknown / cross- agent / out of retention.

Telemetry

• Per-turn stats: host-side vacuum sweep: the sink writes to /state/hyperhive-turn-stats.sqlite on each agent's state dir; needs a periodic retention sweep mirroring events_vacuum.rs so the table doesn't grow forever. Default keep-window: 90 days (turn-stats are denser than events but smaller per-row, ~200B each).
• Surface per-turn stats on the agent web UI: badges sourced from the new sink — open_threads count chip, open_reminders count chip, "N turns today" chip, rolling tool-call histogram tooltip on the model chip. Both open_threads and open_reminders are already columns on every row; the badge just reads the latest. The richer histograms read across rows.
• Stats UI on the main dashboard: per-agent rollups (avg turn duration, tokens-since-boot, top 5 tools) on the container row. Same data source, host-side aggregation query.

Bugs

• Post-rebuild system-message missed wake: at 09:13:14 the dashboard showed system → damocles container rebuilt as ✓ delivered, but the agent harness never ran a turn for it (no claude invocation, no operator-visible activity). A subsequent recv() from inside the agent returned (empty), confirming the message was popped + marked delivered server-side — yet drove no turn. Most likely cause: the agent_server serve_agent_stdio task is up and answering MCP/socket calls, but the hive-ag3nt::serve long-poll loop that drives drive_turn either died silently during rebuild or never restarted. Investigate: (a) does hive-ag3nt's serve loop survive nixos-container update cleanly, or does its tokio runtime get torn down mid-loop? (b) is there an early-exit path on a transient socket error during rebuild that drops the serve task without notifying the manager? (c) compare timeline with manager's own post-rebuild wake to see if this is rebuilt-agents-only or universal. Could be related to the recv_blocking fix in e423d57 if the rebuild restarts the broker mid-subscribe.