Troubleshooting

Vault Not Found

Symptom: Vault tools (vault_list, vault_query, etc.) return “Vault not found at /home/user/Projects/knowledge” with setup instructions.

Cause: The vault path was not configured when registering the MCP server. Hive defaults to ~/Projects/knowledge, which may not exist on your machine.

Fix: Re-register the MCP server with VAULT_PATH pointing to your Obsidian vault:

# Claude Code
claude mcp add -s user hive -e VAULT_PATH=$HOME/my-vault -- uvx --upgrade hive-vault

# Gemini CLI
gemini mcp add -s user -e VAULT_PATH=$HOME/my-vault hive-vault uvx -- --upgrade hive-vault

Both VAULT_PATH and HIVE_VAULT_PATH are accepted. If both are set, HIVE_VAULT_PATH takes precedence.

Note: The server starts even without a valid vault path — worker tools (worker_status, delegate_task) still work. Only vault-specific tools require a valid path.

Hive Not Available in Other Projects

Symptom: You installed Hive in one project but it doesn’t appear when starting a session in a different project.

Cause: You registered Hive at project scope (default) instead of user scope. Project-scoped MCP servers only work in the project directory where they were registered.

Fix: Re-register at user scope — this is the recommended setup since Hive’s vault is shared across all projects:

# Claude Code — note the -s user flag
claude mcp add -s user hive -- uvx --upgrade hive-vault

# Gemini CLI — already user scope by default with -s user
gemini mcp add -s user hive-vault uvx -- --upgrade hive-vault

After re-registering, restart your AI assistant session. Hive will now appear in every project.

Why user scope matters: Hive connects to a single knowledge vault that stores context for all your projects. Project-scope registration defeats this — you’d need to register Hive separately in every project, and they’d all point to the same vault anyway.

Ollama Shows “offline” in worker_status

Symptom: worker_status reports Ollama as offline, but curl http://your-ollama:11434/api/tags works.

Cause: The HIVE_OLLAMA_ENDPOINT environment variable is not set in your MCP server registration.

Fix: Re-register the MCP server with the endpoint explicitly set:

# Claude Code
claude mcp add -s user hive \
  -e HIVE_OLLAMA_ENDPOINT=http://your-ollama:11434 \
  -- uvx --upgrade hive-vault

# Gemini CLI
gemini mcp add -s user \
  -e HIVE_OLLAMA_ENDPOINT=http://your-ollama:11434 \
  hive-vault uvx -- --upgrade hive-vault

MCP servers do not inherit your shell’s environment variables. Every env var must be passed explicitly at registration time.

OpenRouter Returns 429 (Rate Limit)

Symptom: delegate_task fails with a rate limit error on the free tier.

Cause: OpenRouter free tier models have per-minute rate limits. This is normal under heavy usage.

Fix: Wait 60 seconds and retry. For sustained workloads, set max_cost_per_request=0.01 to use the paid tier (capped by HIVE_OPENROUTER_BUDGET).

Changes to MCP Config Don’t Take Effect

Symptom: You updated an environment variable (e.g., VAULT_PATH) but Hive still uses the old value.

Cause: MCP servers are loaded at session start. Config changes require a new session.

Fix: Exit and restart your AI assistant session (e.g., restart Claude Code, start a new Gemini CLI session).

vault_list Returns Empty

Symptom: vault_list shows no projects.

Cause: Either VAULT_PATH doesn’t point to the right directory, or your vault layout doesn’t match the configured scopes.

Fix:

1. Verify your vault path: ls $VAULT_PATH
2. Check that project directories exist under the expected scope directory (default: 10_projects/)
3. If your vault uses a different layout, configure HIVE_VAULT_SCOPES:

HIVE_VAULT_SCOPES='{"projects": "Projects", "meta": "Templates"}'

See Vault Structure for layout details.

”Project not found” Errors

Symptom: vault_query(project="my-app") returns “Project not found” but the directory exists.

Possible causes:

• The project directory is not inside a configured scope directory
• Typo in the project name (it must match the directory name exactly)
• The scope directory itself doesn’t exist

Fix: Run vault_list to see what Hive can find. If your project isn’t listed, check your HIVE_VAULT_SCOPES configuration.

Gemini CLI: MCP Registration Syntax

Symptom: gemini mcp add fails with argument parsing errors.

Cause: Gemini CLI has specific argument ordering requirements. The -- separator is needed to prevent Gemini from consuming the server’s arguments.

Correct syntax:

# Basic registration
gemini mcp add -s user hive-vault uvx -- --upgrade hive-vault

# With environment variables
gemini mcp add -s user \
  -e VAULT_PATH=$HOME/my-vault \
  hive-vault uvx -- --upgrade hive-vault

Key details:

• Server name comes before the command (hive-vault uvx)
• -- separates Gemini flags from server arguments
• -s user installs at user scope (persists across projects)
• Environment variable values are expanded immediately (not stored as references)

vault_write Rejects My Content

Symptom: vault_write with operation="replace" returns a validation error.

Cause: When replacing an entire file, Hive validates that YAML frontmatter includes required fields: id, type, and status.

Fix: Include valid frontmatter in your content:

---
id: my-doc
type: context
status: active
---

Your content here.

Or use operation="append" to add content without replacing frontmatter.

Database Files Growing Large

Symptom: SQLite files at ~/.local/share/hive/ are growing.

Expected sizes:

• worker.db — Budget/usage tracking. Grows ~1KB per delegate_task call. Typical: 10-50KB.
• relevance.db — Adaptive context scoring. Grows ~0.5KB per session_briefing call. Typical: 5-20KB.

Both use WAL mode for performance. If sizes seem excessive, you can safely delete them — Hive recreates them automatically. Budget tracking resets on deletion.

Checking the Debug Log

Hive writes warnings and errors to a persistent log file for post-mortem debugging:

~/.local/share/hive/hive.log

Check this file when tools return unexpected results or the server fails silently. The log rotates at 1MB with one backup file (hive.log.1).

To change the log location:

claude mcp add -s user hive \
  -e HIVE_LOG_PATH=/path/to/custom.log \
  -- uvx --upgrade hive-vault

Tool Calls Hanging or Timing Out

Symptom: MCP tool calls freeze with no response, or return “Tool timed out after 60s”.

Cause: Worker tools (capture_lesson, delegate_task) call external APIs (Ollama/OpenRouter) that may be slow or unresponsive. Write tools (vault_write, vault_patch) may stall if another operation holds the write lock.

Fix:

1. Check worker connectivity: worker_status — if Ollama is offline, fix the connection first
2. If timeouts are too aggressive, increase them:
   • HIVE_TOOL_TIMEOUT=120 — per-tool timeout for async worker tools (default: 60s)
   • HIVE_HTTP_TIMEOUT=120 — HTTP timeout for Ollama/OpenRouter calls (default: 60s)
3. Check ~/.local/share/hive/hive.log for timeout warnings with tool names and elapsed times
4. If write tools return “Server busy”, retry shortly — a previous write operation is finishing

Note: Timeouts are a safety net. A timed-out tool returns a clear error message instead of hanging your session indefinitely. The underlying operation (HTTP call, git commit) is cleaned up automatically.

MCP Transport Disconnect After Rejecting the First Tool Call

Symptom: In Claude Code (and likely other MCP hosts), rejecting the very first mcp__hive__* permission prompt poisons the transport for the rest of the conversation. Subsequent calls to any Hive tool return MCP error -32000: Connection closed, then No such tool available. Restarting the conversation recovers, and claude mcp list still reports the server as connected at the process level.

Cause: A race condition in the upstream mcp Python SDK around mcp.shared.session.RequestResponder. When the client sends notifications/cancelled for an in-flight request, two failure modes can fire:

1. The responder’s anyio CancelScope re-raises a CancelledError after the cancellation response has already been sent. That spurious exception propagates to the server’s receive loop task_group and kills it — the process stays alive but stops reading stdin.
2. The handler finishes after the client has already sent the cancellation, and the late call into RequestResponder.respond() fails with AssertionError("Request already responded to"). The exception escapes the receive loop and kills the same task_group.

Fix: Hive applies two targeted monkey-patches at startup in src/hive/_compat.py:

• RequestResponder.__exit__ — swallows the spurious CancelledError once the responder is marked completed.
• RequestResponder.respond — short-circuits the late call with a WARNING log line (mcp.ghost_response.suppressed_after_cancel_ack) and bumps a counter exposed in vault_health.

Both patches are self-gated to the exact failure mode (_completed=True), so they remain inert once upstream fixes the bug.

Tracked in issue #75 and upstream python-sdk#2610. Regression tests: tests/test_transport_recovery.py + tests/test_compat_shim.py.

If you still see the disconnect:

1. Confirm you are on hive-vault >= 1.14.0 — earlier versions did not ship the second (respond-after-cancel) patch.
2. Check ~/.local/share/hive/hive.log for mcp.ghost_response.suppressed_after_cancel_ack WARNING lines (always logged) or Swallowed spurious cancellation on completed responder debug lines (set HIVE_LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG to enable).
3. As a workaround, always accept the first Hive tool call in a fresh conversation. Later rejections do not break the transport.

Cancelled a Tool Call but the Vault Changed Anyway

Symptom: You (or your client) cancelled a vault_write / vault_patch / capture_lesson call mid-flight — got an ErrorData response back saying “Request cancelled” — but on the next vault_query the file shows the new content as if the operation had succeeded.

Cause: This is not a bug, it is a documented semantic mismatch (ADR-007, amended twice). When the cancel arrives, the upstream RequestResponder.cancel() writes the ErrorData frame to the wire immediately — empirically 20/20 times on Linux, see tests/test_compat_shim.py::test_classify_cancellation_race. But the underlying handler thread keeps running to completion; Hive cannot safely interrupt a partial write (Python asyncio.timeout cancels the awaiting coroutine but cannot interrupt the blocking thread). So the disk is mutated after the cancel ack reaches the client.

The ErrorData ack does NOT imply rollback. The client correctness rule is: verify state via vault_query instead of retrying. Retrying a vault_write(operation="append", ...) after a ghost-response duplicates content; retrying vault_patch may produce ambiguous-match errors against the already-applied result.

How to detect this in your sessions: call vault_health — when ghost responses have occurred, the output includes a block like:

## ghost_responses
- total: 3
- last_seen: 2026-05-20T22:14:07+00:00
- last_tool: vault_patch
- note: ErrorData ack does NOT imply rollback — verify state via `vault_query`, do not retry.

The counter resets when the server restarts. Each event is also logged at WARNING level with the prefix mcp.ghost_response.suppressed_after_cancel_ack plus the tool name and request id.

Mitigations:

• Increase HIVE_TOOL_TIMEOUT (default 60s) so slow worker calls finish before the client cancels.
• For batch writes, prefer vault_write(commit=False) + vault_commit — the per-write cost drops from ~150ms to ~5–15ms, shrinking the cancellation window.
• After any cancellation: vault_query(project=..., path=...) the affected file to inspect the actual disk state before issuing another write.

Available from hive-vault >= 1.14.0. The empirical wire-behavior classifier ran 20 iterations on Linux and confirmed scenario (a) — ErrorData wins the race — in 20/20 cases; see ADR-007 Amendment #2 for the full retraction of the earlier “raw send” plan.

Multi-Session Contention (3-5 concurrent Claude Code sessions)

Baseline note: Hive is commonly used with 3-5 Claude Code sessions open in parallel against the same vault. This is the daily-usage baseline, not edge case. The MCP stdio model spawns one hive-vault subprocess per session, so 4 windows = 4 sibling processes sharing the same SQLite DBs (~/.local/share/hive/*.db) and the same vault git repo.

If those processes accumulate, or if you also run obsidian-git for auto-backups, three symptoms can appear:

• WAL file bloat. ~/.local/share/hive/relevance.db-wal grows 10-100× the size of the steady-state DB because concurrent readers prevent SQLite from checkpointing the WAL.
• Silent freezes during writes. A vault_write or capture_lesson takes 10-30 seconds when obsidian-git is auto-committing in the background (its 10-minute interval holds .git/index.lock during pull + commit + push).
• Zombie hive processes. A Claude Code window crashed or was force-quit, but its uvx hive-vault child stayed alive holding file handles open.

Inspect the current state

Run vault_health(include_runtime=True) from any session. The ## runtime block reports:

- wal_size_bytes: 4137984          # >5 MB sustained = contention
- competing_pid_count: 3            # other hive-vault PIDs (same user)
- last_git_lock_wait_ms:
  - mean: 12.5
  - p99: 8234.0                     # p99 > 5000ms = contention
  - samples: 47
- obsidian_git_present: true        # external committer detected

Healthy: wal_size_bytes under a few MB, last_git_lock_wait_ms.p99 under 100ms.

Spot a zombie hive process

POSIX (Linux, macOS) — list all hive processes and their age:

ps -eo pid,etime,cmd | grep hive-vault | grep -v grep

Inspect which file handles a specific PID holds:

lsof -p <PID> | grep hive

Kill a zombie:

kill <PID>          # graceful
kill -9 <PID>       # force

Windows (PowerShell) — list hive processes:

Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.ProcessName -match "hive-vault|python" } |
  Select-Object Id, StartTime, ProcessName, Path

Kill by PID:

Stop-Process -Id <PID>           # graceful
Stop-Process -Id <PID> -Force    # force

Tune HIVE_LOCK_TIMEOUT_S

Default 30 seconds. The lock-acquire timeout used when hive contends for the git filelock. Capped at 600 to prevent foot-guns.

Scenario	Recommended	Why
Default	30	Matches subprocess timeout; absorbs typical obsidian-git ticks
Large vault + slow disk	60-90	obsidian-git’s pull + commit + push can hold the lock 15-30s on a 50 MB vault
Slow network + autoPull=true	90-120	Network pull dominates; raise to avoid abandons
Fast vault, fail-fast preference	10	If you’d rather see errors than wait

Set via HIVE_LOCK_TIMEOUT_S=60 env var.

Tune HIVE_WAL_CHECKPOINT_INTERVAL_S

Default 30.0 seconds. How often each hive process runs PRAGMA wal_checkpoint(PASSIVE) to drain its SQLite WAL. Lower = more aggressive draining; higher = less CPU spent on idle ticks.

Default is appropriate for most users. Raise to 120 if you observe excessive CPU on idle hive processes (e.g., on resource-constrained machines); the trade-off is slower WAL drain.

obsidian-git cooperation pattern

If your vault uses obsidian-git for auto-backups, the two tools cooperate cleanly when configured properly:

• Set obsidian-git’s autoSaveInterval to 5-10 minutes (default is fine).
• For write-heavy flows, prefer vault_write(commit=False) / vault_patch(commit=False). Hive writes the file; obsidian-git commits on its next tick. Per-write cost drops from ~150ms to ~5-15ms.
• Use vault_commit only when you need an explicit flush before obsidian-git’s next tick (e.g., before closing Obsidian).
• Watch vault_health.runtime.last_git_lock_wait_ms.p99. If it stays above 5000ms, raise HIVE_LOCK_TIMEOUT_S to absorb the longer windows.

A future release will make the cooperation automatic (auto-defer when external committer healthy); for now it is opt-in via commit=False.

Partial-State Writes After Deadline

When vault_write or vault_patch hits its tool-call deadline (default 60s) while the supervisor is killing a stuck git add/git commit, the file on disk may already have been written — but the git commit never landed. The response will include the suffix:

 (partial state — disk write succeeded, git commit killed by deadline; verify with vault_query before retrying)

Or, when the deadline fires before the handler even returns, the response is:

vault_write timed out after 60s — partial state: disk write succeeded, git commit killed by deadline; verify with vault_query before retrying.

What to do

1. Do NOT blindly retry — retrying with native FS tools risks double-writes. The file is already on disk.
2. Verify the actual state with vault_query:

   vault_query(project="my-project", path="11-tasks.md")

   Compare against what you intended to write.
3. Inspect the git status if you have shell access to the vault:

   git -C "$VAULT_PATH" status --porcelain

   The file should appear as modified or staged; nothing committed.
4. Recover the commit either by:
   • Calling vault_commit (Hive flushes whatever is dirty), or
   • Letting obsidian-git pick it up on its next tick (if installed), or
   • Manually git -C "$VAULT_PATH" add . && git commit -m "vault: rescue partial state".

Why this happens

The deadline supervisor terminates the git add / git commit subprocess, but the Python thread holding the cooperative .git/hive.lock may still be in mid-communicate() (especially on Windows). The on-disk write is atomic; the commit is not. The partial-state suffix is the contract Hive exposes to let downstream agents avoid double-writes.

Operator triage

When investigating, look at ~/.local/share/hive/hive-<pid>.log for lines like:

WARNING git add failed for [...] rc=-1 cause=external_termination err=[external_termination] killed by supervisor at 2026-05-27T18:00:00+00:00 ; original stderr: empty

The cause=external_termination tag is one-grep-able and tells you the supervisor killed it (vs cause=git_error for genuine git failures). The synthetic stderr with the ISO-8601 timestamp lets you correlate against the partial-state response received by the client.

Getting Help

If your issue isn’t listed here:

1. Run vault_health to check vault connectivity and file counts — the ## server identity block at the top reports the running version, python, vault path, and backend presence so you can include them verbatim in a bug report (no API keys are exposed). Add include_runtime=True for uptime, registered tool names, multi-session contention metrics, and the OpenRouter budget snapshot.
2. Run worker_status to check provider connectivity and budget
3. Check ~/.local/share/hive/hive.log for error details
4. Check the Configuration page for all environment variables
5. Open an issue at github.com/mlorentedev/hive