What is the point of heartbeats?

[vittau]

Heartbeats wake the agent with an injected prompt (which sometimes overlap with what I'm typing, messing it all up) and only serves for it to say "yep, the agent is still going".

If the agent actually stops, nothing will be triggered and the orchestrator will be left waiting indefinitely.

So what's the point of heartbeats? Wouldn't it be better to have a "stall detector" built in Orca, which will warn the orchestrator when an agent it spawned is in a wait state? Or perhaps have the heartbeat be tracked by Orca itself, and not reach the agent..

EDIT: I can think of perhaps one legitimate use for it, which is to keep the KV cache warm. But still, the point remains about stalled agents.