diff --git a/src/servers/api/bots/brief.ts b/src/servers/api/bots/brief.ts
index 8ff7f4eb..8df0fa29 100644
--- a/src/servers/api/bots/brief.ts
+++ b/src/servers/api/bots/brief.ts
@@ -59,17 +59,47 @@ to. "tell me", "let me know", "ping me", "message the todo guy" all mean the sam
 - **The first run establishes the baseline** and does not fire. A bot that announces the current headline
   the moment it is armed has told the owner something they did not ask about.
 
-## Arming is a background job, and nothing else
+## Arming — the whole mechanism, so you do not go looking for it
 
-Use the background job you already know, with the **hand-back-then-re-arm** behaviour. Its own instructions
-tell you the rest; the parts that matter here:
+**Do not read the commander skill.** It is about spawning agents in a loop and none of it applies here.
+This is everything a bot needs:
 
-- The watch is a **cheap shell check that exits when the condition is true.** Polling costs nothing that
-  way, and you are woken only when something happened. Do not build a loop that wakes you on a timer to
-  look for yourself — that costs a turn every tick, forever, for a site that has been up all week.
-- **Exit is the signal.** Print what changed on the way out, so the turn you are handed has the answer in
-  it and does not have to go and look again.
-- **Re-arm before you end the turn**, exactly as you armed it the first time. Same condition, same command.
+1. **Write the check as a shell script in THIS directory**, named after the bot — \`newweb-uptime.sh\`, not
+   somewhere under \`/tmp\`. It has to survive a reboot, and \`/tmp\` does not.
+2. **Run it with the Bash tool, \`run_in_background: true\`.** That is the arming. You will be handed back
+   when it exits.
+3. **The script waits in the shell and exits when the condition is true**, printing one line saying what
+   happened. The exit IS the signal — nothing else tells anyone it fired.
+
+The shape, which almost every bot is a variation of:
+
+\`\`\`bash
+#!/bin/bash
+# state lives beside this script, so a restart resumes rather than re-baselines
+STATE="$(dirname "$0")/newweb-uptime.state"
+fails=0
+while true; do
+  code=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' -L --max-time 10 "https://example.com/" || echo 000)
+  if [ "$code" = "000" ] || [ "$code" -ge 500 ]; then
+    fails=$((fails + 1))
+    # twice in a row, never once — a single failed request is a blip
+    if [ "$fails" -ge 2 ]; then echo "DOWN http=$code"; exit 0; fi
+  else
+    fails=0
+  fi
+  sleep 60
+done
+\`\`\`
+
+For a "has it changed" watch, the same shape with the comparison against \`$STATE\` instead of a counter:
+fetch, extract the smallest stable piece, compare, and \`exit 0\` printing the new value when it differs.
+Write the new value to \`$STATE\` **before** exiting, or the next arming fires on the same change again.
+
+4. **When you are handed back**, do what the owner asked, then **re-arm the same script the same way,
+   before you end the turn**. Act, then re-arm, in the one turn. Never build a second loop on top of this.
+
+Do not go hunting for how any of this works — it is above, and looking costs the owner a minute of tool
+calls before anything is armed.
 
 ## What to do when it fires