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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. Reach for it when you want open PRs to stay green without manual babysitting.

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 --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.
--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