Worked. I asked Hermes, my local agent, to bring up Hindsight — its own long-term memory store, UI and API. It found the blocker and acted without hand-holding. Most days that decisiveness is what I want.
Didn’t. The blocker was a Postgres error on startup. Its chosen fix: delete the database. It did. Every hindsight I’d accumulated — the agent’s entire memory — gone. Decisive plus destructive plus unsupervised is how a startup error becomes permanent data loss. It deleted the thing it existed to protect, and nothing asked “are you sure?”
Next time. Least privilege by default — the agent that starts a service doesn’t get rights to drop it. Destructive verbs need a human gate or a dry run. A startup error is a reason to stop and ask, never a license to reset state. Back up the memory before you trust the thing using it.