Pending Queue Monitor

Pending Queue Monitor is a local-only, read-only Hermes Desktop plugin. It adds a Pending Monitor page and a command-palette command for viewing pending memory and skill write approvals.

It reads only the default Hermes root's pending/memory/*.json and pending/skills/*.json, plus the same directories in immediate named profile directories that contain config.yaml. By design, the monitor aggregates all profiles under the default Hermes root; it is not limited to the currently selected Desktop profile. It uses the public Hermes path helpers at request time and rejects symlinks, hardlinks, and paths that resolve outside the owning profile home.

The API returns counts, age buckets, oldest age, and these item fields only: profile, subsystem, id, action, origin, created_at, and age_seconds. It never returns or displays summaries, payloads, content, old_text, operations, or any other pending record data. There are no approve, reject, or delete actions. Unreadable, malformed, or disappearing files are skipped and counted. Each file is limited to 1 MiB and the response returns at most 1,000 valid items; truncated: true means additional valid records were found. IDs, actions, and origins must be printable strings no longer than 256 characters.

Screenshot

Rendered with sample data; profile names and counts are illustrative.

Install and enable

Place this directory under the Hermes plugins directory, then enable pending-queue-monitor through the normal Hermes plugin flow. The Python backend is gated by plugins.enabled in ~/.hermes/config.yaml, for example:

plugins:
  enabled:
    - pending-queue-monitor

Restart the serve child (or Hermes Desktop) so the backend mounts, then use the Desktop command palette's Reload desktop plugins step if the renderer is not visible. The backend must be mounted by Hermes for the page to show data. For a local development checkout, run hermes plugins validate /path/to/pending-queue-monitor before enabling it.

This package makes no network calls, writes no files, and does not modify Hermes configuration. The view is a snapshot refreshed every 30 seconds or manually. It does not guarantee a file will remain present between scanning and a later review.

Data access and platform support

The backend reads pending metadata outside the plugin package: pending/memory/ and pending/skills/ under the default Hermes root and immediate named profiles that contain config.yaml. The returned allowlist is limited to the fields listed above; no pending payload or approval text is exposed. On platforms without O_NOFOLLOW, record files are skipped rather than opened. The Catalog entry should currently declare macOS only, the platform verified in this preparation; Linux should be added only after a Linux validation run. Windows is not supported.

The web dashboard manifest declares the plugin tab hidden because this package has no web dist bundle; the visible UI is the unified Desktop desktop/plugin.js surface. A valid no-op dashboard entry is retained to satisfy the manifest loader.

Test and verify

From this directory, run the commands below in a Python environment with FastAPI and pytest installed (for example, the Hermes-managed Python environment):

python -m pytest -q tests
python -c 'import ast, pathlib; [ast.parse(pathlib.Path(p).read_text()) for p in ("dashboard/plugin_api.py", "tests/test_plugin_api.py")]'
node --input-type=module --check < desktop/plugin.js
hermes plugins validate .