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hive babysit

Manages the experimental PR babysitter — a background process that polls your open pull requests and keeps them mergeable. It auto-rebases green PRs that have fallen behind main, and asks your development agent to repair merge conflicts or red CI in an isolated worktree.

The babysitter is a separate process from the daemon. It only touches projects that set babysitter.enabled: true.

Usage

hive babysit start [--detach] [--dry-run]
hive babysit stop
hive babysit restart [--detach] [--dry-run]
hive babysit status
hive babysit reload
hive babysit tail
hive babysit install [--force]
hive babysit --once PROJECT [--dry-run]
hive babysit --once --all [--dry-run]

This command is text-only; it does not emit a --json envelope.

Subcommands and options

Subcommand / flag	What it does
start	Starts the babysitter. Add --detach to run it in the background.
stop	Sends a graceful stop and waits for in-flight PR repairs to finish before escalating.
restart	Stops a running babysitter and starts a fresh one.
status	Reports running / not-running plus uptime, and recommends a restart if the process predates your current Hive install.
reload	Re-reads config and log settings. Does not reload code into a detached process — use restart after upgrading Hive.
tail	Follows the babysitter log.
install [--force]	Installs and starts the per-user babysitter service (systemd user unit on Linux, launchd on macOS). --force overwrites an existing unit, and the previous one is backed up. Does not accept --dry-run.
--once PROJECT	Runs a single poll tick for one project (handy for smoke tests and dry runs).
--once --all	Runs a single tick across every enabled project.
--dry-run	Runs without mutating GitHub: the agent writes a plan instead, and git/gh are replaced with read-only stubs. Use throwaway repos for destructive validation.

Project configuration

Enable the babysitter per project in <project>/.hive-state/config.yml:

babysitter:
  enabled: true
  interval: 10m
  max_concurrent_prs: 2
  labels_ignore: [wip, do-not-merge, draft]
  auto_rebase: true
  budget_minutes: 30
  budget_usd: 50

babysitter.enabled: false is the kill switch and takes effect within one poll interval. auto_rebase (default true) controls auto-rebasing green-but-behind PRs onto the base branch; a rebase that conflicts is left untouched for a human. PRs whose labels match labels_ignore, and draft PRs, are skipped.

Examples

# Dry-run a single project to see what the babysitter would do
hive babysit --once my-project --dry-run

# Run it in the background and check on it later
hive babysit start --detach
hive babysit status