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Operating

Day-2 guide for running Hive’s background services — the daemon, the experimental PR babysitter, and the Telegram bot — plus driving Hive from a coding agent.

  1. The daemon
    1. Before you go live: the dry-run shakedown
  2. The Telegram bot
  3. The PR babysitter (experimental)
  4. Updating & uninstalling
  5. Drive Hive from a coding agent
    1. OpenClaw /hive skill

The daemon

The daemon is the worker: it polls hive status --json and dispatches workflow verbs for enrolled projects, stopping at human-input or recovery gates. It’s installed as a per-user service — systemd-user on Linux, launchd on macOS — and enabled by default at install time. Per-project config only decides whether that project is picked up.

hive daemon install     # write + enable the per-user service (idempotent; repairs autostart)
hive daemon status      # is it running?
hive daemon start --detach   # start once in the background while troubleshooting
hive daemon tail        # follow the daemon log
hive daemon stop
hive daemon disable     # stop and remove autostart

Enroll or unenroll a project by editing its .hive-state/config.yml (daemon.enabled) — see Configuration. Full reference: daemon.

Before you go live: the dry-run shakedown

Hive is token-heavy and acts on real repositories. Do a --dry-run shakedown on a project before letting the daemon drive it unattended, watch the queue in hive tui, and keep budgets/timeouts (and patrol/babysitter enrollment) conservative until you trust the loop. If costs run away, hive daemon stop halts dispatch immediately.

The Telegram bot

The bot notifies you, shows the queue, and accepts approvals from your phone. It uses long polling, so there’s no webhook, public URL, or tunnel to set up.

  1. Create a bot with @BotFather (/newbot) and copy the token.
  2. Message your new bot once (/start) so Telegram exposes your chat id.
  3. Get your numeric chat id from getUpdates (see the bot page for the exact command).

  4. Allow that chat in ~/.config/hive/config.yml:

    bot:
  enabled: true
  chat_id_allowlist:
    - 123456789

  5. Start it:

    hive bot start
hive bot status --json

Then send /help, /status, or /queue in Telegram. Voice-note idea capture needs an OpenAI-compatible transcription key in the environment (e.g. HIVE_WHISPER_API_KEY); it’s read from the environment and never written into config. If a token leaks, rotate it in @BotFather with /revoke and restart the bot.

The PR babysitter (experimental)

hive babysit watches your open PRs and keeps them green and mergeable: it runs bounded agent-repair attempts in isolated worktrees, auto-rebases green-but-behind PRs onto a moving main, and hands off to a human when it can’t fix one (drafts and conflicts are left alone). It’s off by default and enabled per project. See babysit.

Updating & uninstalling 

hive update --dry-run   # print the would-be command for your install channel
hive update             # delegates to the installing channel (brew / yay / install.sh)
hive uninstall          # removes registrations/config/cache, preserves your work
hive uninstall --purge  # non-interactive; still preserves work

Project state stays at <project>/.hive-state/; install and uninstall never move completed pipeline work. See update and uninstall.

Drive Hive from a coding agent

Hive’s other primary surface is a coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, Pi, or anything that can run shell commands and read output. Every workflow verb supports --json and emits a typed envelope, so an agent parses structured output instead of scraping text:

Run hive status --json and tell me which tasks are waiting for me.
Run hive new your-project "<title>" and report the slug it printed.
Run hive review <slug> --json and summarize the resulting envelope.

hive tui is intentionally human-only and rejects --json — use the CLI verbs and hive status --json for programmatic use.

OpenClaw /hive skill

Hive publishes one OpenClaw skill through ClawHub:

openclaw skills install hive-cli

Public listing: https://clawhub.ai/ivankuznetsov/hive-cli. That installs the /hive slash command. Run the guided setup:

/hive setup

It installs the Hive CLI through the documented channel, verifies hive/hv, runs hive daemon install, and optionally initializes the current project. After setup, pass Hive commands through /hive …, e.g. /hive status --json, /hive new . "build this feature", /hive review <slug>.