Cron Safety Integration Example¶

Goal¶

Wrap a scheduled Hermes task with maturity staging, state tracking, idempotency, compact errors, and hard stops.

Recommended Layout¶

reports/my-cron-job/
├── STATE.md
├── run.log
└── output/

Before the Cron Runs¶

Confirm the task has passed the 4-condition test.
Start at L1 and define the promotion criteria before automation begins.
Create STATE.md from templates/STATE.md.template.
Define idempotency keys for every side effect.
Define the hard stops that force downgrade to L1.

Runtime Flow¶

cron trigger
  -> read STATE.md
  -> check maturity level
  -> check idempotency keys
  -> run deterministic collection steps
  -> call LLM only for judgment or synthesis
  -> run Maker/Checker gate when output quality matters
  -> write STATE.md after each side effect
  -> compact and classify errors

Promotion Rules¶

From	To	Requirement
L1	L2	Reports are useful for at least one week
L2	L3	Human approvals are boring and consistently safe
L3	L1	Any hard stop, unsafe write, or repeated quality failure

Example Hard Stops¶

Output path is outside the approved report directory.
The source returns malformed data for more than half of items.
The Checker score falls below the pass threshold twice in a row.
STATE.md cannot be read or written.

Compact Error Example¶

[STEP_FAILED] write_state@2026-06-30T10:00:00+08:00
  Error: PermissionDenied - STATE.md could not be updated
  Hint: stop the loop and fix filesystem permissions
  Recoverable: NO
  Impact: idempotency cannot be guaranteed