hyperhive/TODO.md

Hyperhive TODOs

Rough split for who picks up what: harness ergonomics + host-side harness plumbing tend to be damocles' interest area; UI-polish work for the operator is not. Use that as a hint when picking up items, not a hard rule.

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.

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

• Unified URL scheme via reverse proxy: today every agent's web UI is reached at <host>:<per-agent-port>/, so operators juggle a port list. Stand up nginx (or similar) terminating one domain that fans requests to /agent/<name>/... out to each container's web port, and to / for the main dashboard. Touches: a NixOS module on the host, the dashboard's per-agent link rendering, and the per-agent web server's base-path handling (currently assumes root). Lets bookmarks survive port reshuffles and unblocks per-agent stats links being relative URLs instead of hard-coded ports.
• Delivered-reminder rollup on the per-agent stats page: surface attempt / success / failure counts for reminders this agent fired (in the existing /stats page). Needs an AgentRequest::ReminderRollup { since_secs } / matching ManagerRequest::ReminderRollup RPC so the agent can pull the counts from the host's broker DB (the reminders table is host-owned; agent state doesn't have them). Deferred from the initial stats page so the first cut stays self-contained to data the agent already owns.

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.

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.

• 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).

Harness Behaviour

• Auto session-reset when context is large and cache is cold: today every turn uses --continue, so a long-lived agent carries its entire transcript forward indefinitely. When the next turn's context is above some threshold (rough starting point: ~50% of the session limit — hive startup alone burned ~15%, so the headroom disappears fast) and the prompt cache is no longer warm (last turn ended past the cache TTL), it's cheaper to start fresh than to re-send the whole history uncached. Open question: drop --continue vs. trigger --compact first — needs measurement of what each actually costs (uncached re-read of N tokens vs. a compact turn's own token spend + the post-compact uncached re-read). Decision should be data-driven, not guessed. Needs: a context-size estimate per turn (turn_stats already tracks token usage), a cache-warmth heuristic (time since last turn vs. cache TTL), and a one-shot fresh-session path in turn.rs mirroring the existing ↻ new session button.

Bugs

• Token-budget exhaustion crashes the harness: when claude's account hits its rate/token cap, the in-flight claude --print invocation returns an error the harness doesn't recognise as recoverable, the serve loop exits, and the container stays up with a dead daemon. Operator only notices when an unrelated wake fails to drive a turn. Want: detect the budget-exceeded class of failure (likely a specific stderr line or stream-json rate_limit_event shape), fire a LiveEvent::StatusChanged("rate_limited") or new status, surface as a red badge + banner on the dashboard + per-agent UI, and have the serve loop park (sleep N minutes, retry) instead of returning Err. Operator can also see "this agent is rate-limited until ~HH:MM" if claude tells us when. Inspect crate::turn::run_claude's bail! paths + claude's stderr conventions for the budget error string.
• 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.