Python on tsvinc

One space in a path, and Hermes blocked echo hi

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Builds on My guard blocked bash -c. Models write bash -lc., which explains the guard that Hermes runs as a hook here.

echo hi was blocked. So was every other terminal command and every file read and write Hermes Agent tried. The guard in my agent-config templates is supposed to stop destructive commands, and on this install it stopped everything, which is one way to be secure.

Hermes runs my guard as a pre_tool_call shell hook, with fail_closed: true. That setting is deliberate: if the guard can't give a verdict, the tool call doesn't run. A guard that fails open is a guard that an unlucky crash switches off. The cause was the install's HERMES_HOME, the directory Hermes keeps its config and hooks in: it had a space in its name.

A text search OOM-killed the whole tmux pane

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

22:57:55: eight lines of Python start searching a scratch directory for one log line.

23:01:49: the kernel kills them. They hold 15.3 GiB of RAM and another 1.4 GiB of swap.

By 23:01:51, systemd has stopped everything else in that tmux pane: the interactive session, a context probe nearly four minutes into a 262k-token request, a go test -count=100.

All of it to find one log line.

The search, and what it walked into#

for root,ds,fs in os.walk('agent-work'):
    if 'review-cutting' in root or 'client-research' in root: continue
    for f in fs:
        p=os.path.join(root,f)
        try: t=open(p,errors='replace').read()
        except: continue
        for l in t.splitlines():
            if 'host a9: engine' in l and 'up after' in l: print(p, l[:200])

It was checking a single fact for a blog post: which log lines said when a GPU box's engine had come up. The command eight seconds before it had filtered by extension, .log .txt .out .err. This one didn't. It walked the whole scratch tree, which held, among the logs, a 2.7 GB GGUF model downloaded that evening for another job.

The power went out twice. My UPS log saw it once.

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thirty lines of log, one outage. Twenty-two lines on grid, seven on battery, one back on grid. Clean, readable, and short by one event: the plug came out of the wall twice.

The setup itself works. A BLUETTI AC180 portable power station sits between the wall and my workstation as a UPS. Linux reads it over Bluetooth LE, through an encrypted link, with no account and no pairing, in about nine seconds per read. What it can't do is tell you about anything that happens between two of those reads. Neither can anything else built on polling. This one put it in writing.