in-process heartbeat or updates

[tbowman01]

A Unified Approach to Overseeing Swarm Agents/Tasks

Scenario

When tasking a swarm of agents, if I don’t actively watch the matrix of logs scroll by, I need a way to get status or current tasking information without:

• Waiting for the next to-do list to pop up
• Waiting for the summary of transactions
• Checking recently modified files

Goal

A quick, unified heartbeat/status interface for both individual agents and the entire swarm.

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Example Status Line Outputs

/statusline [Agent] Heartbeat — 3 active, queue 2 | agent=SecurityLead tasks_active=3 queue=2 errors=0
/statusline [Agent] Heartbeat — 1 active, queue 0 | agent=BuildEngineer tasks_active=1 queue=0 errors=1
/statusline [Agent] Heartbeat — 7 active, queue 5 | agent=QA tasks_active=7 queue=5 errors=0
/statusline [Agent] Heartbeat — 0 active, queue 4 | agent=ProjectAnalyzer tasks_active=0 queue=4 errors=0

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Message Schema

Agent-level heartbeat:

/statusline [Agent] Heartbeat — {tasks_active} active, queue {queue_len} | agent={name} tasks_active={n} queue={n} errors={n}

Swarm-level heartbeat:

/statusline [Swarm] Heartbeat — {active} active, queue {queued} | agents={n} active={n} queue={n} errors={n}

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Cadence & Hygiene

• Cadence:

  • HEARTBEAT_MINUTES = 5 is a sweet spot.
  • Add ± random jitter to avoid synchronized bursts.

• Ownership:

  • Each agent emits its own Agent heartbeat.
  • A Swarm sidecar emits the roll-up heartbeat.

• Payload Discipline:

  • Use key=value pairs in --extras for structured parsing.
  • Example: active=3 queue=7 p95=812ms errors=0

• Backoff on Errors:

  • If an agent detects repeated failures:

    • Reduce heartbeat frequency.
    • Add state=degraded.

• Silence on Idle (Optional):

  • Skip heartbeats when active=0 and queue=0 for more than N minutes.

  • Replace with a Pulse every 30–60 min:

    /statusline [Pulse] Idle | agent=QA active=0 queue=0
    

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Maybe this could be added to the dashboard you demo'd a few weeks ago. Something that we could monitor in another window.
What are your thoughts?