How-To Series · 6: Working While You Sleep

Hermes · Recurring Loops

Re-run a prompt on a recurring cadence inside your session. Timer-driven, not judge-driven.

After this videoYou can set a loop to poll, monitor, or iterate on a schedule, and stop it when the work is done.

Recurring loops let Hermes re-run a prompt on a schedule inside your current session. Each wakeup is a real agent turn that reads current state, does the work, and reports back. Use fixed intervals when an external clock drives the work, or self-paced mode where Hermes backs off exponentially while replies stop changing. Loops end on a stop condition, a run cap, an evidence-based condition, or when you stop them. For unattended work on a real schedule, use cron instead.

About these resources. Every command in this video comes from the Recurring Loops doc.

New words here · Plain English

one sentence each · full glossary
Recurring loopA prompt Hermes re-runs on a schedule inside your current session, like every 5 minutes, until a stop condition fires.
Fixed intervalA loop cadence you set with a clock, like 30 seconds or 5 minutes, that fires on that schedule.
Self-pacedA loop cadence Hermes sets itself, backing off exponentially while replies stop changing and snapping back when they differ.
Run capA limit on how many times a loop fires, set with --times N, so it cannot run forever.

Sources · What this video distills

1 docs page · every command below traces to it
Primary guide
Recurring Loops
Read ↗

Commands shown · Copy and paste

each shows the source doc it came from
Start a fixed-interval loopfrom source ↗
/loop 5m check the deploy status and tell me if it is live yet
Loop a slash commandfrom source ↗
/loop 10m /recap
/loop 2m poll CI --times 30
Evidence-based conditionfrom source ↗
/loop 5m watch the queue --until queue depth reaches zero
Stop the loopfrom source ↗
/loop stop

Going deeper · Related Hermes docs

further reading · not sources of facts shown above

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