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fix(agent): skip external memory providers in background review agent - #24281

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DanielMaly wants to merge 1 commit into
NousResearch:mainfrom
DanielMaly:fix/background-review-honcho-leak-v2
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fix(agent): skip external memory providers in background review agent#24281
DanielMaly wants to merge 1 commit into
NousResearch:mainfrom
DanielMaly:fix/background-review-honcho-leak-v2

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@DanielMaly

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Reopened from #21511 (auto-closed during fork sync).

The background review agent was inadvertently calling external memory providers (Honcho, etc.) during its review cycles, which:

  • Wasted API calls and tokens on non-user-facing background work
  • Could trigger unintended side effects in external memory systems
  • Created noise in observability/monitoring

This fix adds a check to skip external memory provider calls when the agent is running in background review mode.

The background self-improvement review agent was initializing external
memory providers (e.g. Honcho) because skip_memory defaulted to False.
This caused the review prompt to be written as a user message, polluting
peer representations with agent-internal system instructions.

- Pass skip_memory=True to the review agent constructor in
  _spawn_background_review() so external providers never initialize
- Add 'background_review' and 'subagent' to the Honcho plugin's cron
  guard as defense-in-depth, matching supermemory's existing behavior

Closes NousResearch#4052 (cron case was fixed, but background review path was missed)
@alt-glitch alt-glitch added type/bug Something isn't working comp/agent Core agent runtime: loop, agent_init, prompt builder, context-compression, responses endpoint comp/plugins Plugin system and bundled plugins P3 Low — cosmetic, nice to have labels May 12, 2026
@DanielMaly

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Closing this because the main functional fix landed upstream independently in #27190 (973f27e956: skip_memory=True for the background review fork). I’m dropping my overlapping fork divergence and keeping the fork aligned with upstream here.

@DanielMaly DanielMaly closed this May 17, 2026
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comp/agent Core agent runtime: loop, agent_init, prompt builder, context-compression, responses endpoint comp/plugins Plugin system and bundled plugins P3 Low — cosmetic, nice to have type/bug Something isn't working

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