The kanban dispatcher sets HERMES_KANBAN_TASK on every spawned worker
but launches it with the assignee profile's HERMES_HOME (e.g.
~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/), which has no gateway.pid file. The
existing _check_send_message therefore returned False from the
is_gateway_running() fallback, even though the parent gateway is
alive and reachable.
Net effect: workers could call kanban_* tools (gated on
HERMES_KANBAN_TASK in _check_kanban_mode) but not send_message. This
breaks the natural pattern of "worker does the job, calls
send_message to deliver rich content to the originating chat, then
calls kanban_complete with a one-line summary" because the kanban
notifier's payload_summary is hard-truncated to the first line
(~200 chars) at gateway/run.py:3963 — anything richer has to ship
via send_message.
Honoring HERMES_KANBAN_TASK in _check_send_message — symmetric with
_check_kanban_mode in kanban_tools.py:42 — closes the gap. No new
state, no new env var, no profile-config changes required.
Dominikh
8ac998cb0c