macOS: speaker assertion persists after Herdr-spawned afplay exits; coreaudiod grows to ~5 GB

[OLT2000]

Is this a reproducible bug?

• I confirm this is a reproducible bug, not a feature request, idea, question, contribution proposal, or direction check.
• I reproduced this bug on the version and environment reported below using the exact steps provided.

Current behavior

During normal use on September 24, coreaudiod grew to about 5 GB of memory footprint and reached 426% CPU. Read-only diagnostics found 117 retained built-in-speaker power assertions whose original creating processes had exited (including a PID that had subsequently been reused).

One was tracked directly: afplay PID 99583 was a child of herdr PID 90740. Core Audio held an audio-out BuiltInSpeakerDevice assertion with Created for PID: 99583. About 53 seconds later the player was gone, but that assertion remained.

These are observations from an existing session, not proof that Herdr causes all the memory growth. Other audio apps were open. A sound-disabled control and reproduction on the latest release have not been completed.

Expected behavior

Audio resources associated with completed notification playback should be released; repeated notifications should not accompany accumulating stale audio assertions and sustained audio-daemon memory growth.

Reproduction

1. Use Herdr 0.7.3 in Ghostty with background agents and sound notifications enabled. The observed persistent session had approximately 32 workspaces.
2. While notifications occur, run pmset -g assertions and ps -axo pid,ppid,etime,comm. Match a Herdr-launched afplay PID to Core Audio's Created for PID field.
3. Repeat those read-only checks after that player exits. Its speaker assertion remains. During the observed session the count increased from 116 to 117 while coreaudiod remained abnormally busy.

Impact

Severe laptop slowdown and repeated audio-daemon memory growth. I force-quit coreaudiod after collecting the above observations.

Environment

• Herdr version: 0.7.3 (Homebrew; reconfirmed with herdr --version)
• Update channel: stable
• Operating system: macOS 26.6.2 (25G83), Apple Silicon, 48 GB RAM
• Terminal: Ghostty
• Shell: zsh
• Relevant config: sound notifications enabled; built-in speakers were the output device