TaskWatch

A background-task watchboard for the Hermes Agent desktop app: every process your chat dispatches through terminal(background=true) — claude, opencode, codex, zcode, a build, a test run, anything — rendered as a live roster with output tail, runtime, a silence heartbeat and OS notifications.

你派出去的后台编码代理（cc / opencode / codex / 任何终端进程）在干什么、有没有卡死，一块面板看清。

Screenshots

The watchboard pane: one row per dispatched background process, with runtime, status and the latest output line.

Expanded row: the append-only live tail — scrollable history while the task keeps running.

Why

Dispatching a coding agent in the background answers "is it running?" but not "what is it doing, is it stuck, did it finish?" — and each agent has its own transcript format. TaskWatch watches at the terminal-process layer instead: it renders the gateway's own process.list projection for the focused chat, so it is agent-agnostic by construction.

Features

Live roster pane — one row per background process: command, runtime, last output line, status dot
Silence heartbeat — a running task whose output stops changing shows silent N min; configurable threshold (5/10/20/30 min)
OS notifications — task goes silent past the threshold, or exits (success/failure by exit code) → native toast (fires while you are away from Hermes; in-app toast otherwise)
Stop button — two-click confirm, goes through the gateway's process.kill verb and only reaches processes the focused chat owns
Expandable output — click a row to expand a scrollable view of the most recent 32 KB of output (agent thinking included when the agent prints it to the terminal); mouse-wheel through it while the task keeps running
Status-bar chip — running count, hidden while idle, highlighted when something is silent past the threshold; click to reveal the pane (same host.revealPane gesture as the OMH status item)
English + 中文

Install

Copy desktop/plugin.js into your Hermes desktop-plugins folder, named by the plugin id:
```
<hermes home>/desktop-plugins/taskwatch/plugin.js
```
(%LOCALAPPDATA%\hermes\desktop-plugins\taskwatch\plugin.js on Windows, ~/.hermes/desktop-plugins/taskwatch/plugin.js by default otherwise.)
In the desktop app, run Reload desktop plugins from the command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K). The pane appears on the right; drag it anywhere.

No build step, no dependencies, nothing to compile.

How it works

Data: the gateway's process.list session RPC — the same projection the desktop dock renders, scoped to the focused chat's own processes.
Heartbeat: TaskWatch compares the process output tail between polls; an unchanged tail while the process is running means silence. Silence is a heuristic — a quiet build is not a stuck build — which is why it surfaces "silent N min" (possible wait-for-input or stall) rather than claiming failure.
Notifications: in-app toast always; native OS toast (fired by the plugin, gated by Settings ▸ Notifications ▸ "Plugin notifications") so you hear about a stalled or finished task while working in another window.
Stop: the gateway's process.kill session verb, which refuses any process the focused chat does not own.

Privacy: everything is local. The pane reads the process projection for the chat you focused; nothing is written, exported or sent anywhere; no model tokens are spent.

Watching a dispatched Claude Code task

claude -p holds its output until the end, so a dispatched task looks silent in any watchboard. Stream it instead, piped through the bundled pretty-filter:

claude -p "task" \
  --output-format stream-json --verbose \
  --dangerously-skip-permissions \
| python tools/cc-stream-pretty.py

The filter renders one readable line per completed block — [think], [tool], [result], [say], [done] — in real time, which the TaskWatch tail then surfaces live. Leave --include-partial-messages off: token-level deltas would flood a rolling tail. The full session still lands in ~/.claude/projects/**/**.jsonl, and claude agents / claude attach <id> cover the interactive replay.

Scope & roadmap

v1 (this repo): focused-chat roster, silence heartbeat, exit notifications, stop.
Candidate next: all-sessions roster (per profile), loop detection (same tool + same arguments repeated, as hermes-monitor does for kanban workers), click-through to the matching terminal tab, catalog submission.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.