Sometimes I want to ask hermes about a /bg task I gave it, what it's doing and how good its progress is. I give Hermes the task ID and ask it about this hermes background task but it looks for the task and can't find it, tells me it doesn't exist, so I have to wait for it to finish and sometimes it gets stuck in loops for a long time. This is something that is handled very easily on openclaw or kimi-cli
#background task monitoring / inspection
sweet mesa
snow ember
You are not missing a magic wording for the task ID. In the current released behavior, /bg / /background starts a separate background session and gives it a task ID, but that ID is not yet exposed as a durable inspectable task handle for the foreground agent.
That is why asking the main session “what is bg_... doing?” can fail even though the task exists. The background task is isolated and normally only reports back when it completes or fails.
This is already tracked upstream here:
https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/8568
There is also an open PR for CLI-side background task observability:
https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/8592
cc @red shoalor @vagrant wave (review?)
That PR is aimed at adding things like /bg status, /bg log <task-id>, /bg files <task-id>, and /bg kill <task-id>, plus storing background-task artifacts under Hermes home. That is the shape of feature needed for the behavior you are describing.
If you are seeing this outside local CLI/TUI, please say which platform you are using, because gateway background tasks may need the same inspection path wired separately.
red shoal
