hermes process reaper

The problem

Background tasks often leak, leading to stale processes that poll context for hours or duplicate expensive research passes. This results in context pollution and wasted API credits when multiple agents spawn identical jobs for the same task.

What it does

• Registers every spawned background job with PID, purpose hash, and TTL in a persistent local registry.
• Prevents duplicate spawns by checking the registry for existing processes with the same purpose hash.
• Automatically reaps orphaned processes at session end or every 30 minutes based on parent task status.
• Discards late-arriving output from killed processes to prevent context corruption.
• Enforces mandatory API key redaction at the moment of process spawning to prevent credential leaks.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Standard agents lack a persistent registry to track background state across sessions. This skill implements a rigorous lifecycle management system that handles process cleanup and deduplication, which simple prompting cannot reliably enforce during complex multi-step research tasks.

Use cases

• Managing long-running research tasks that need to survive intermittent agent disconnections.
• Preventing redundant API calls when re-running research scripts during the same session.
• Cleaning up failed processes that continue to run with invalid or expired credentials.

Known limitations

Requires local filesystem access for the SQLite or JSON registry. Default TTL for research spawns is strictly capped at 10 minutes.