Automatic Result Feedback

13.6. Automatic Result Feedback — Results Automatically Find Their Way Back

The core problem: a finished answer must not be allowed to vanish

This is the point that closes chapter 13 with an important trust commitment: if the gateway “dies” right between generating an answer and the platform actually confirming that it was sent, that answer previously silently vanished — and you still paid for the model call you had spent without ever receiving the result.

The delivery-obligation ledger

The new mechanism records every final reply in a durable ledger in state.db right around the moment it is sent to the platform, and automatically redelivers it the next time the system restarts — closing a serious (P1) hole of silently losing results, applying to every channel: Telegram, Discord, Slack, and all the other platforms described in chapter 5.

Combined with the ownership-checked ledger for background delegation

As described in 13.4, results from background subagents use a similar mechanism — with ownership checks (ownership-checked) to ensure that results restored after a restart are delivered to exactly the right session/requester, without confusion or misdelivery.

The connection to 19.6 — where results need to reach the right place

This is exactly the infrastructure layer behind the “results must reach the right channel” principle described in 19.6 — not just a matter of configuring the right destination, but also of technically guaranteeing that once an answer has been generated, it will definitely arrive, even if an infrastructure incident happens exactly at the moment of sending.

Notes

• No extra configuration is needed to benefit from this mechanism — it is a default infrastructure guarantee, applying to every delegation task and every gateway channel.
• For important production workloads (cron jobs, long background delegation), the existence of this ledger mechanism is one more reason to feel confident running Hermes on an always-on VPS (chapter 1) rather than on a personal machine that can power off at any moment — results are not lost, but you still need continuously running infrastructure for the redelivery mechanism to have a chance to execute on restart.
• If you suspect a delegation result was “lost” before updating to the version with this ledger, this is exactly the kind of incident that updating Hermes (2.5) directly fixes — not a user-side configuration error.