The dispatcher watchdog (release_stale_claims) reads tasks.last_heartbeat_at
to decide whether to reclaim a running task. The agent maintains its own
in-process `_last_activity_ts` for every chunk/tool result, but those
liveness ticks never reach the board unless the model explicitly calls
the `kanban_heartbeat` tool — so a worker actively executing a long run
without tool-level heartbeats can be reclaimed mid-flight as 'stale',
returning the task to ready and orphaning the in-flight worker's progress.
Fix: in `_touch_activity` (the canonical 'we just did work' hook in
run_agent.py), call a new `heartbeat_current_worker_from_env` helper
in `tools/kanban_tools.py` that:
- No-ops outside dispatcher-spawned worker context (no HERMES_KANBAN_TASK).
- Rate-limited to one DB write per 60s (runtime activity ticks too often
to faithfully mirror; we just need the watchdog to see liveness).
- Best-effort: never raises. heartbeat_claim + heartbeat_worker calls are
individually try/except'd; any DB error logs at debug and returns.
- Uses worker env identity: HERMES_KANBAN_TASK + HERMES_KANBAN_RUN_ID +
HERMES_KANBAN_CLAIM_LOCK (all pinned by the dispatcher at spawn time).
- No durable note on auto-heartbeats — that's reserved for the explicit
`kanban_heartbeat` tool which carries a model-supplied note.
The explicit `kanban_heartbeat` tool stays available unchanged for
workers that want to attach a note or pre-emptively extend a claim
across a known-long single tool call.
Co-authored-by: faisfamilytravel <223516181+faisfamilytravel@users.noreply.github.com>
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