Hermes Agent Kanban + Cron Job is POWERFUL (Setup Guide)

Hermes Kanban turns a 14-step sequential cron into a 9-worker parallel pipeline — but only after four custom workarounds.

## Old setup vs. new setup The old cron fired daily at 9:00 a.m. Hong Kong time and spawned a single sub-agent that ran 14 web searches sequentially, wrote the report, updated the HTML landing page, and posted to Discord. One failed search stalled everything, the shell date syntax was passed literally into search queries, and reports had been getting shorter since May 2nd.

The new pipeline runs the same cron, but the parent task dispatches 5 parallel search workers (model releases, tool releases, agent frameworks, trending workflows, plus one for active inputs), then 2 editors that filter duplicates and rank by importance, then 2 publishers that update the HTML and fire a Discord notification. Output is now structured with tables, categorization, and 48-hour verification.

## How to actually get it running Don't assume your Hermes agent knows its own features. The creator's first prompt was: *"Can you study and understand the official documentation of the Kanban features?"* — paste the docs links and ask how they apply to your pipeline. Let the agent create specialist profiles and tool sets via TUI. The gotcha: profile .env files start empty even when a key exists in the main agent's dotenv — remove empty API key fields from config.yaml and copy the real key into each profile, reusing the same key across roles. Token budget suggestion from the agent: 90–100 for researchers, lower for editors, 20–30 for publishers.

## Four things that broke with cron + Kanban 1. Gateway exits early — ready child tasks never get dispatched after the parent completes. Fix: a systemd service keeps the gateway alive 24/7. The creator warns this will burn electricity on a local machine. 2. Duplicate parent tasks on test runs — May 6, 2026 at 9:10 a.m. produced two completed task sets and two Discord pings. 3. No cron-to-Kanban dedup — every scheduled run creates a fresh task set regardless of what's already on the board. Fix: the agent now does a dedup check before spawning. 4. Task accumulation — after one week, the board had 7 parent tasks and 63 children; the dashboard currently lets you block but not delete.

## Recommendation The creator explicitly says: start with a non-cron project in a dedicated workspace folder, not a scheduled pipeline.