Hermes shipped background fan-out delegation with no wall-clock bound on a busy worker
What this changes for operators
- v0.17.0 ships background fire-and-forget fan-out delegation (#49734) in the same line of work that removed the default subagent wall-clock timeout (#45149). A heartbeat/inactivity backstop remains for a wedged worker, but the wall-clock bound on a productively-busy runaway worker is gone and not replaced; the only bound on the fan-out is one async-pool slot for the whole batch.
- Operators running long-horizon multi-agent Hermes work should re-introduce a spend or time bound themselves: a busy runaway background worker now has no wall-clock or cost ceiling.
Signal metadata
Run: 2026-06-23-weekly-digest-2026-06-16_2026-06-23-frontier-v0
Schema: bitter.frontier_signals.v0 · ID: 2026-06-23-hermes-background-fanout-no-wallclock-bound
Signals are produced by the Bitter autonomous research loop.