a skill for bots, which had none

the bot's OWN brief is thorough and lives in the bots directory, rewritten every
turn. what was missing is the doc for everyone else: what a bot is, where it
lives, why it has not fired, and how it differs from a commander.

the line is not size. one thing watched and one action is a bot; anything that
has to remember what it already handled is a commander. the bot brief tells bots
not to read the commander skill for exactly that reason.

carries the thing that is easy to lose: <sessionId>.bot.json is the ONLY link
between a conversation and a detached shell pid. a bot deleted on 2026-08-26 was
still polling a website eleven minutes later because that file did not exist yet.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

skills/bots/SKILL.md

@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+---
+name: bots
+title: Bots
+description: >-
+  Use when the owner asks about a bot — what one is, how to start one, why one has not fired, how to stop
+  one, or why it is a bot rather than a commander. Also read it before setting one up FOR them. Carries
+  where a bot lives, the record that is the only thing able to stop it, and the two ways one dies quietly.
+version: 1
+---
+
+# A bot is one thing watched and one thing done
+
+"Notify me when x.com is down." "Tell the todo guy when NYT has a new headline." That sentence is the
+whole specification, and **the first message arms it** — a bot that interviews the owner first has already
+failed at the thing that makes it a bot.
+
+## Bot or commander — the line, and it is not size
+
+- **A bot watches ONE thing and reacts.** A shell loop that exits when a condition is true. No ledger, no
+  procedures, no dispatch policy. Arming is `run_in_background: true` on a script and nothing else.
+- **A commander runs a JOB.** It classifies, it decides, it spawns agents, it keeps `JOB.md` and a record
+  of what it has already handled, and it is set up in a conversation before it is armed.
+
+If the answer to "what does it do when it fires" is one action, it is a bot. If the answer needs a
+paragraph, or the thing has to remember what it already did, it is a commander. Reach for
+[[commander]] there — and note that the bot brief tells bots explicitly NOT to read it, because a bot that
+starts building a dispatch loop has stopped being a bot.
+
+## Where everything is
+
+```
+$DATA_PATH/<owner-email>/bots/
+├── CLAUDE.md              the brief every bot runs under — PLATFORM-OWNED, rewritten every turn
+├── <name>.sh              the watch itself, one per bot
+├── <name>.state           its baseline, so a restart resumes instead of re-firing
+└── <sessionId>.bot.json   the record: script, state, pids, what it watches
+```
+
+Every bot shares that one directory — `getBotsDir(email)` — which is why the record is named for the
+session id rather than filed under it.
+
+The chat list for them is `GET /api/chat/sessions?context=bots`. The context IS the address: no `cwd`
+needed, because there is only one bots directory per owner.
+
+## `<sessionId>.bot.json` is the only thing that can stop a bot
+
+A watch is a detached shell process. Nothing else on the machine knows it belongs to a bot — not the
+transcript, not the session list, and not the process table, which sees an anonymous `bash`. The record is
+the only link between the conversation and the pid.
+
+That cost was paid before the file existed: a bot deleted on 2026-08-26 was still polling a website eleven
+minutes later, with nothing in the product able to find it. So when a bot re-arms, it rewrites the record
+with the new pid, in the same turn. A record that is stale is worse than absent — it names a pid that may
+now belong to something else entirely.
+
+## Why a bot has not fired — check in this order
+
+1. **Is the process alive?** Read the record, then `ps -p <pid>`. A watch dies with a reboot and nothing
+   re-arms it automatically; the bot re-arms itself on its next turn, which needs a message.
+2. **Has it fired already and not re-armed?** The exit IS the signal. A bot that fired, reported, and
+   never re-armed looks identical to one that is watching quietly.
+3. **Is the baseline wrong?** A "has it changed" watch that wrote its state before exiting will not fire
+   on the same change twice. That is correct, and it is also the usual reason a test does not reproduce.
+4. **Is it watching the wrong thing?** `watches` in the record is the bot's own description of its job.
+   Compare it to what the owner actually asked for before debugging any further down.
+
+## The two ways a bot dies quietly
+
+- **A reboot.** The loop is a plain background process; nothing supervises it. The record survives, which
+  is what lets the next turn re-arm from it — so a bot that has been silent since a restart is not broken,
+  it is unstarted.
+- **A fired-and-forgotten watch.** It exited, said its line, and the turn ended without re-arming. Act,
+  re-arm, record — in one turn — is the rule in the brief precisely because forgetting the third step is
+  invisible until the thing never fires again.
+
+## Setting one up for the owner
+
+Say the sentence and let the bot arm itself. The brief in that directory is thorough and current — it is
+rewritten on every turn from `src/servers/api/bots/brief.ts`, so it cannot drift from the platform the way
+a copy here would.
+
+**Do not paste the mechanism into the conversation.** If you find yourself explaining the script shape, the
+record, or the naming rules to a bot, it has not read its own brief and the fix is to point at it.
+
+## Naming
+
+A bot's automatic title is the owner's first sentence, truncated, typos included. It is a prompt, not a
+name. Two to four words, the subject and what is watched about it — `newweb uptime`, `NYT front page`,
+`gitea disk space`. Not "Website Monitor Bot": every bot is a monitor, so the word earns nothing in a list
+of them.