Hivemind turns agent traces into skills and shares with your team

Fixes #100 and #110.

Why

Two spawn-lifecycle bugs in openclaw/src/index.ts:

#100 — Wasted re-spawns: agent_end fires on every turn. The on-disk lock at ~/.deeplake/state/skillify/<projectKey>.worker.lock prevents overlapping workers, but as soon as a worker exits and releases its lock, the NEXT agent_end re-acquires it and spawns a fresh worker. The fresh worker does one watermark-check SQL roundtrip, sees nothing new to mine, and exits — but each spawn costs ~50ms Node cold-start + ~200ms DB I/O. A 50-turn session ends up doing 2-5 spawns instead of 1.

#110 — Stale locks halt mining permanently: tryAcquireOpenclawSkillifyLock does O_CREAT | O_EXCL | O_WRONLY and treats any pre-existing lock as "live worker, skip." There's no staleness check. If a worker dies abnormally (host kill, OOM, segfault) before its finally releases the lock, the lock persists forever and every subsequent agent_end silently no-ops mining for that project_key permanently. Hit live during the 2026-05-07 PR #98 E2E — a manual rm <lockfile> was needed to recover.

What changed

Per-runtime dedup (#100)

• New module-level const skillifySpawnedFor = new Set<string>(). Tracks which session IDs have already triggered a spawn in this gateway runtime.
• agent_end handler now wraps the spawnOpenclawSkillifyWorker(...) call in if (!skillifySpawnedFor.has(sid)) { skillifySpawnedFor.add(sid); … }.
• The on-disk lock stays authoritative across processes (e.g. multiple gateway restarts). The new in-memory Set only suppresses within-runtime redundancy.

Stale-lock recovery (#110)

• Lock file now writes String(Date.now()) on acquire (was an empty file).
• On O_EXCL failure, reads the existing lock body, parses it as a ms timestamp. If Date.now() - ts > 10 minutes OR the body is unparseable (NaN), the lock is treated as stale → unlinked → retry acquire.
• Mirrors the staleness logic in src/skillify/state.ts:tryAcquireWorkerLock for the non-openclaw agents.
• Migration: empty pre-existing lock files (from earlier code) parse as NaN and are treated as immediately stale on the first patched run — no manual cleanup needed.
• 10-minute max age is generous vs typical worker runtime (<30s + buffer). Pathological hangs longer than that release the spawn slot to the next agent_end, instead of leaking mining for the rest of the gateway's lifetime.

Tests

• npm run typecheck — clean
• npm test — 2380/2380 passing (one bundle-scan regex distance bumped 500→1500 to accommodate the new dedup comment block between Auto-captured and the spawn site; same assertion intent)

Test plan after merge

• [ ] Long-running openclaw session (50+ turns). grep -c "Auto-captured" /tmp/openclaw/openclaw-*.log should be many; ls ~/.deeplake/state/skillify/*.worker.lock should show at most one mtime-bump per session (one spawn, not 2-5).
• [ ] Kill a worker mid-mine (kill -9 $WORKER_PID). Wait 11 minutes. Next agent_end should successfully re-acquire the lock (stale-recovery path).

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Bug Fixes

  • Improved reliability of background worker spawning in extended agent sessions by preventing redundant spawn attempts
  • Enhanced detection and cleanup of stale worker states
  • Added error handling to gracefully manage worker startup failures

• Tests

  • Updated test validations for worker spawning behavior