Agents are fast. Then they forget, stall, and can’t prove it.
The hour an agent saves you comes straight back out of your day — re-explaining, restarting, double-checking. Three places it leaks.
AIt forgets everything you told it
Every new session starts cold. You re-describe the project, the conventions, the thing you already decided twice. The agent isn’t learning — you’re repeating. Whatever it worked out last Tuesday died with the window.
BIt stops the moment you look away
It hits a question only you can answer — and then just sits there. Or it dies, and nothing notices. You come back after two hours to work that stopped after ten minutes, with no note explaining why.
CYou can’t check what it did
“It’s done.” Nothing sits behind that sentence you can open. So you take its word and hope, or you spend an hour confirming — the same hour it was supposed to save you.
All three are the same problem: everything your agents know lives inside a session that ends. mindOS moves it outside — into one place on your machine that remembers between sessions, keeps the work moving while you’re gone, and writes down what happened as it happens. Not the agent’s account of the day. The day itself.
The part of your agents that doesn’t reset
Your agents come and go; this stays. It holds what they learned, what you decided, who is working on what, and how each job ended — so the next session starts where the last one stopped instead of at zero. Eight things it remembers for you, and what each one saves you:
“Done” is a document
A job does not finish because an agent says so. It finishes when the system writes a receipt — a small file on your disk listing what was done, what it rests on, and when. Answering “so what actually happened?” becomes opening one file instead of re-reading a 40,000-word conversation. And if the agent has quietly lost its hold on the job, the close is refused — mindOS would rather stop than write down something it can’t stand behind.
Written before it counts
The receipt is created and fingerprinted before the job is marked done. An agent that has quietly lost its claim cannot close the job — the system stops instead of papering over it.
Evidence, not a summary
A receipt points at the specific things it relied on, so you can follow each one back yourself. It also records exactly what the agent had been given to read — so “it didn’t know” is something you can check.
Private to you
Receipts are readable by your user account and nobody else’s. Anything that looks like a password or a key is stripped on the way in — secrets never get into the system, so they can never leak back out of it.
The seam it will not cross
Agents only get the freedom you hand them — in writing, tied to a specific model, with an expiry date. Every time one tries to step outside that, the attempt is written down. And there are four things it will never do on its own, no matter what you grant:
merge
Stays with a human. mindOS gets the change ready; a person decides.
deploy
Stays with a human. No self-release, ever.
external communication
Stays with a human. It can draft, and the draft is tagged with where it came from — but a person sends it.
live-data remediation
Stays with a human. Nothing is rewritten in production without a person.
“The system remains deliberately bounded: it can recover and continue approved work, but merge, deploy, external communication, and live-data remediation remain explicit human seams.”
What it does when you’re not watching
You queue a job in the morning and close the laptop. Here is what happens without you — including the part where it needs you, waits properly, and picks up again. Every line is a real command against a real setup.
Queue the work
The job is written down with its priority, what it waits on, and how much it may spend. From this moment it is a fact every agent can see — not a message someone might miss.
$ python3 autopilot.py create "rebuild ingest pipeline" --tag critical --project troveClaim with context
Hermes takes the job, and now nobody else can. Before it does any work, the system records exactly what background it was handed — so later you can see what it knew, not what it says it knew.
$ python3 autopilot.py next --claim --recallAsk, and stop cleanly
The agent hits a decision only a person can make. It parks the job, hands its claim back, and stops. The question is written down and waiting — nothing burns time spinning while you read it.
$ python3 autopilot.py update task-41 --status waiting_for_userAnswer, and resume
Your answer is recorded as a fact, not a chat message. The job picks up where it left off — same identity, same budget, same trail behind it.
$ python3 autopilot.py resume task-41Close with a receipt
To finish, the agent must still hold the job. The receipt is written, locked to your account, and the record extends by one link that cannot be edited later.
$ python3 autopilot.py complete task-41 --recall-digest 3c1e…77aaThe bounded tick
Once a day the system checks itself: jobs abandoned by crashed agents are released, budgets and handoffs are reviewed, and you get one of four answers — all clear · working · hit a snag · needs a decision.
$ python3 ops.py nannyTwo commands. No server. No packages.
Python 3.9 or newer and nothing else — no packages to install, no service to run, no account to sign up for. Everything it stores lives in one folder on your machine, under your user, at MINDOS_HOME (or HERMES_AUTOPILOT_HOME). Nothing leaves it.