Kanban Worker — Pitfalls and Examples

You're seeing this skill because the Hermes Kanban dispatcher spawned you as a worker with --skills kanban-worker — it's loaded automatically for every dispatched worker. The lifecycle (6 steps: orient → work → heartbeat → block/complete) also lives in the KANBAN_GUIDANCE block that's auto-injected into your system prompt. This skill is the deeper detail: good handoff shapes, retry diagnostics, edge cases.

Workspace handling

Your workspace kind determines how you should behave inside $HERMES_KANBAN_WORKSPACE:

Kind	What it is	How to work
`scratch`	Fresh tmp dir, yours alone	Read/write freely; it gets GC'd when the task is archived.
`dir:<path>`	Shared persistent directory	Other runs will read what you write. Treat it like long-lived state. Path is guaranteed absolute (the kernel rejects relative paths).
`worktree`	Git worktree at the resolved path	If `.git` doesn't exist, run `git worktree add <path> ${HERMES_KANBAN_BRANCH:-wt/$HERMES_KANBAN_TASK}` from the main repo first, then cd and work normally. Commit work here.

Tenant isolation

If $HERMES_TENANT is set, the task belongs to a tenant namespace. When reading or writing persistent memory, prefix memory entries with the tenant so context doesn't leak across tenants: