Hermes Kanban: The Idempotent Nightly Review

The Stack

Tested Against

Prerequisites

• Hermes Agent (MIT): `curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash`
• `hermes setup` (LLM provider — only to run the review itself)
• cron (or any nightly trigger) calling the create command
• Node 20+ (used here to read the --json board state)

Steps

1. 1

   Create with a dated idempotency key, twice

   The trick that makes a cron/webhook trigger safe: call create with `--idempotency-key "nightly-ops-$(date -u +%F)"`. CI calls it twice with the same key and asserts the second call returns the SAME task id (no duplicate) — an un-fakeable property of the board.

   hermes kanban init >/dev/null
   mkid() { node -e 'let s="";process.stdin.on("data",d=>s+=d).on("end",()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))'; }
   KEY="nightly-ops-$(date -u +%F)"
   echo "idempotency key: $KEY"
   ID1=$(hermes kanban create "Nightly ops review" --assignee ops --idempotency-key "$KEY" --max-runtime 30m --json | mkid)
   ID2=$(hermes kanban create "Nightly ops review" --assignee ops --idempotency-key "$KEY" --max-runtime 30m --json | mkid)
   if [ -n "$ID1" ] && [ "$ID1" = "$ID2" ]; then echo "idempotent OK: repeat returned same id $ID1"; else echo "DUPLICATE: $ID1 vs $ID2"; exit 1; fi
   hermes kanban list --json | node -e 'let s="";process.stdin.on("data",d=>s+=d).on("end",()=>{const o=JSON.parse(s);const t=Array.isArray(o)?o:(o.tasks||o.items||[]);console.log("cards titled Nightly ops review: "+t.filter(x=>x.title==="Nightly ops review").length)})'

2. 2

   Schedule it (cron) and run the review (worker step, not CI)

   Add a line like `0 3 * * * hermes kanban create "Nightly ops review" --assignee ops --idempotency-key "nightly-ops-$(date -u +%F)" --max-runtime 30m` to crontab. The dated key makes re-triggers safe; `--max-runtime` caps a stuck worker. The review itself runs a model, so CI doesn't run it.