Recurring Loops (/loop)

/loop re-runs a prompt (or a slash command) on a recurring cadence inside your current session. Each wakeup is a real agent turn: Hermes reads the current state fresh — the latest CI result, the newest queue depth, the file as it is now — does the work, reports back, and goes quiet until the next tick.

It's Hermes' take on Claude Code's /loop (and its /proactive alias, which works here too). Where /goal is judge-driven — "keep working until this objective is achieved" — /loop is timer-driven: "do this again every N minutes (or whenever it makes sense) until something says stop."

When to use it

• Polling external state. "Watch the deploy / the CI run / the queue and tell me when it changes." The canonical use case.
• Iterate-until-green. "Run the tests, fix what fails, repeat until they pass."
• Monitoring during a work session. Keep an eye on error rates or a long job's progress while you do something else in the same conversation.
• Periodic housekeeping. Re-run a lint pass or a status summary every N minutes during a long session.

When the work should run unattended — overnight, on a real schedule, surviving restarts of your terminal — use a cron job instead. /loop lives inside a session; cron lives outside all of them. And when the task is a single objective with a definition of done, /goal is usually the better fit.

Quick start

/loop 5m check the deploy status and tell me if it's live yet

What you'll see:

1. Loop accepted — ↻ Loop set (every 5m): check the deploy status…
2. First wakeup in 5m — while the session is idle, Hermes injects the wakeup and runs a normal turn against current state.
3. Repeat — every 5 minutes, until a stop condition fires or you stop it.

Loop a slash command just as easily:

/loop 10m /recap

The two cadence modes

Fixed interval — you set the clock. Give an interval (30s, 5m, 2h, 1h30m) and the loop fires on that schedule. Use it when the thing you're watching changes on its own timeline:

/loop 2m poll the build at ci.example.com/job/42 and ping me the moment it finishes

Self-paced — Hermes sets the clock. Omit the interval and the loop paces itself: it starts at the floor (1 minute by default), and while the agent's replies stop changing it backs off exponentially — 2m, 4m, 8m, up to the ceiling (15 minutes by default). The moment a reply differs from the last one, cadence snaps back to the floor. Change detection is a local digest comparison (timestamps are ignored), so idle waits cost nothing extra:

/loop keep an eye on the migration and summarize progress

The rule of thumb: fixed interval when an external clock drives the work; self-paced when the work drives the rhythm.

Stop conditions

A loop ends when any of these fires:

Examples:

/loop 2m poll CI --times 30
/loop 5m watch the queue --until queue depth reaches zero

Commands

Works on the CLI, the TUI (hermes --tui), the web dashboard chat, the desktop app, and every gateway platform (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, …). On messaging platforms the gateway fires wakeups even between your messages — the loop belongs to the chat's session, and its results arrive as ordinary replies.

Mixing with /goal

Both features inject synthetic turns at idle boundaries, so they follow one rule: an active goal owns the session. While a /goal is actively driving (judge saying "continue"), loop wakeups defer. The loop resumes using idle time as soon as the goal finishes, pauses, or parks itself on a wait barrier (/goal wait, or the judge's automatic WAIT verdict). A parked goal plus a /loop is a natural combo: the goal waits on the big async thing while the loop keeps a heartbeat on something else.

A real user message always wins over both — wakeups only fire while the session is idle and nothing of yours is queued.

Behavior details

• A wakeup is a normal user-role turn. No system-prompt mutation, no toolset swap — prompt caching stays intact.
• Survives /resume and compression. Loop state persists per session and migrates across context-compression boundaries, same as /goal.
• One loop per session. Setting a new /loop replaces the old one. Run several loops by running several sessions (or use cron for a fleet of schedules).
• Interrupting a wakeup turn (Ctrl+C) pauses the loop — recoverable with /loop resume, so cancel actually means cancel.
• Token cost scales with cadence. Every tick is a full agent turn. Match the interval to how often the state actually changes; prefer self-pacing for idle waits.

Configuration

# ~/.hermes/config.yaml
loops:
  min_interval_seconds: 30       # floor for fixed intervals
  max_ticks: 100                 # backstop budget (0 = unlimited)
  self_paced_floor_seconds: 60   # self-paced starting cadence
  self_paced_ceiling_seconds: 900  # self-paced max backoff

The --until judge routes through the goal_judge auxiliary task, so auxiliary.goal_judge.* overrides (provider, model, max_tokens) apply to loop conditions too.

/loop vs /goal vs cron