Meal-Planning Cron Setup — Known Pitfalls & Fixes

Condensed troubleshooting guide for the nutrition-coach cronjob stack. Each section provides the symptom → root cause → fix.

1. Interactive Interview Via Cronjob Is Impossible

Symptom

Wed 19:30: Agent sends 10 questions to Telegram group.
User replies 19:35–19:42 in Telegram.
current_interview.json: all answers are null

Root cause A cronjob is a single-shot process. It sends, then exits. It never reads Telegram inbound messages. User replies arrive in the gateway but there is no running session to pair them with.

Fix options

Replace with a non-interactive reminder (recommended for automation):
```
hermes cron edit <id> --prompt "🔔 Wochenplan: Schreibe \"interview\" oder \"plan\" um loszulegen." --no-agent
```
User types a keyword in chat → triggers the interview in a live session.
Use a live session for the interview. Load the skill (/skill meal-planning) and run the interview interactively. Store the JSON for Friday.

2. Delivery Target Fails on Named Groups

Symptom

delivery error: Telegram send failed:
invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'Schoen Inc'

Root cause Cron deliver field expects a numeric chat_id or a pre-registered alias. "telegram:Schoen Inc" is a display name, not a parseable ID.

Fix Use one of the following verified targets for the nutrition-coach profile:

"deliver": "telegram:D S"         // DM with Dominik
"deliver": "telegram:-5265906503" // Schoen Inc group
"deliver": "telegram"            // home channel

3. Model Override in Cron JSON Is Not Updated by `hermes config set`

Symptom Bulk-switched profile to vllm/glm-5-2-nvfp4 via hermes config set, but cronjob still calls vllm/moonshotai/kimi-k2.6.

Root cause Cron jobs hard-code model and provider inside their own JSON entry in profiles/nutrition-coach/cron/jobs.json. The profile config.yaml is not consulted at runtime.

Fix — Python one-liner

import json
path = '/home/debian/.hermes/profiles/nutrition-coach/cron/jobs.json'
with open(path) as f:
    data = json.load(f)
for j in data['jobs']:
    if 'nutrition' in j['name'].lower():
        j['model'] = 'vllm/glm-5-2-nvfp4'
        j['provider'] = 'noris'
with open(path, 'w') as f:
    json.dump(data, f, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False)

4. Interview JSON Schema Mismatch

Symptom nutrition-plan-generator-v4.py crashes with KeyError on fields it expects (e.g. dominik_ho, special_events).

Root cause The interview data file (current_interview.json) was created by a different schema than the generator expects. Cronjobs that produce JSON by LLM free-form output are fragile.

Fix Always use the Interview Schema template (templates/interview-data-schema.json) when persisting. Validate before saving:

python3 -m json.tool current_interview.json >/dev/null || echo "INVALID JSON"

Verification Checklist After Any Change

hermes --profile nutrition-coach cron list            # jobs running under correct profile?
hermes config --profile nutrition-coach | grep Model  # profile model correct?
python3 -c "import json; d=json.load(open('/home/debian/.hermes/profiles/nutrition-coach/cron/jobs.json')); print([j['model'] for j in d['jobs']])"  # cron model correct?
cat /home/debian/.hermes/profiles/nutrition-coach/plan_data/current_interview.json | python3 -m json.tool  # interview valid?

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