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12 unversioned skills now versioned at 1.0.0: agent-communication, ascii-video, external-reasoning-augmentation, jotty-notes-api, minecraft-modpack-server, obsidian, pokemon-player, powerpoint, social-search, songwriting-and-ai-music, workspace-context-organization, youtube-content Total repo: 141 skills across all profile scopes
70 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
70 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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name: hermes-cron-design
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description: Design principles for Hermes cron jobs — keep LLM jobs focused on judgment, move deterministic work to scripts.
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version: 1.0.0
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metadata:
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hermes:
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tags: [cron, design, patterns, simplicity]
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---
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# Hermes Cron Job Design
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## Core Principle
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**One cron job = one responsibility.** An LLM cron job should do exactly one judgment task. If the prompt grows beyond ~500 words for a data-processing job, you're almost certainly doing deterministic work that belongs in a script.
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## The Split
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| LLM Cron Job (judgment) | Script (deterministic) |
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|--------------------------|------------------------|
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| Classify type/tags/entities | Quality scoring math |
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| Detect contradictions | Cosine dedup |
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| Synthesize observation text | Deletion with caps |
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| Decide supersession | Checkpoint management |
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| Extract named entities | Live count queries |
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| | Vector fetch + write-back |
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| | Log updates, ETA calculation |
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## Anti-Pattern: The Monolithic Prompt
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Do NOT write a 4,000-word prompt that asks an LLM to execute a full ETL pipeline via curl. This produces:
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- JSON parsing bugs (string indices must be integers)
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- Off-by-one errors (scroll offset inclusive vs exclusive)
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- Counter drift (self-incremented vs ground truth)
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- Half-organized points (organized_at stamped before write completes)
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- Unbounded prompt growth as each bug fix adds more rules
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The LLM is the judgment engine, not the execution engine.
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## Pattern: Classification-Only Cron
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The simplest and most reliable pattern. The LLM does ONE thing:
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1. Scroll unorganized points
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2. Classify each (type, mem_class, tags, entities, confidence)
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3. Write back via set_payload
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4. Report
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~500 words. No scoring, no dedup, no deletion, no pass-2, no self-healing. A separate script or cron handles everything else deterministically.
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## Pattern: Multi-Job Pipeline
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For complex workflows, chain focused jobs:
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```
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Job A (LLM): Classify 100 points → write type/tags/entities
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Job B (script): Score classified points → write quality_score
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Job C (script): Dedup via vector search → merge + delete
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Job D (LLM): Consolidate episodics → synthesize observations
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Job E (script): Garbage collect → delete noise/expired
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```
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Each job is simple, testable, and can't break the others.
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## Pitfalls
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- **Don't ask an LLM to do math.** Quality scoring, cosine comparison, deletion caps, ETA calculation — these are arithmetic. A script can't get them wrong.
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- **Don't ask an LLM to manage state.** Checkpoints, counters, daily ceilings, pass numbers — these are state machines. A script can't drift them.
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- **Don't ask an LLM to guarantee atomicity.** Log-then-delete, organized_at-with-payload — these are transaction patterns. A script can't half-write them.
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- **Don't iterate prompts to fix deterministic bugs.** If Claude finds a bug in your scoring formula or your Qdrant filter syntax, that's a signal the logic belongs in code, not prose.
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