a bot was deleted tonight and its watcher was still polling a website eleven
minutes later. nothing in the product could find it: a bot's watch is a
detached shell process, killing the harness ends the agent, and the loop it
started is not its child.
so a bot writes <sessionId>.bot.json beside its script — what it watches, the
script, the state file, the pids. that record is the ONLY thing connecting a
process to the bot that owns it, and the brief now says so in those words
rather than as bookkeeping.
the id is in the FILENAME because bots share a directory: deleting knows only
an id, so this is a lookup rather than a scan, and a record whose contents are
damaged still gets found and cleaned up.
DELETE /chat/sessions/:id tears it down after forgetting the tables — children
first then the recorded pid, same ordering as stopCommanderProcesses, so the
loop cannot spawn a replacement between the two. every transcript in the
returned chain, not just the id asked for. unconditional rather than gated on
"was this a bot", because the record only exists in the bots directory and a
branch on cwd is a second place to get it wrong. script and state go too, and
only if they are inside the bots directory — an agent wrote that path.
and the reviver sweeps bots on the same tick. a record with pids and none of
them alive is a stopped watch; there is no armed flag and there should not be,
since the record is written when it arms, so its existence IS the intent. the
three-wake bound is shared, keyed bot-<sessionId>.
the wake prompt forbids reconstructing a watch from memory when the record is
gone: a watch subtly different from the one agreed is worse than none, because
it looks like it is working.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
arming one watch took eight discovery calls and a 307-line read of the
commander skill before anything happened. the brief said "use the background
job you already know" and it did not know it, so it went looking — and what it
found is a document about spawning agents in a loop, almost none of which
applies to a bot.
so the mechanism is written down here instead: write the script in this
directory, run it with the Bash tool and run_in_background, the script waits in
the shell and exits when the condition is true, the exit is the signal, re-arm
before ending the turn. plus the shape almost every bot is a variation of, with
the twice-in-a-row rule already in it.
and it says NOT to read the commander skill, by name. an instruction to look
somewhere is an invitation to read everything on the way.
one real fix rides along: the first bot wrote its script to /tmp, which does
not survive a reboot. the template puts the script and its state file beside
each other in the bots directory, and says to write the new state BEFORE
exiting — otherwise the next arming fires on the same change again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
"notify me when x.com is down" is a complete instruction. the brief now says so,
and lists every question it was likely to ask along with the answer it should
use instead: one minute, twice-in-a-row before calling something down, follow
redirects, ten second timeout, extract the smallest stable piece rather than the
whole page.
two of those are the difference between a bot somebody keeps and one they turn
off. firing on a single failed request produces a watcher nobody trusts. and the
FIRST run establishes the baseline without firing — otherwise arming a headline
watch immediately announces the current headline, which nobody asked about.
and it can be told who to tell in prose. "@Name [id]" carries an id, but "the
todo guy" is how it will actually be said — so: look it up in the chat list,
match on title, use it if exactly one matches and say which. several matches is
worth the one question. no match is worth asking.
the line between defaulting and asking is stated rather than left to taste: no
address at all is a question, a missing interval is not.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
a bot is a chat whose working directory is bots/, armed through the background
job any chat can already arm. no scheduler was written and none was needed:
handoff already means "poll cheaply, wake the agent only when it fires", which
is the expensive half of a commander without any of its ceremony.
ONE directory, not one per bot. a commander earns its own because it is a job
with procedures and a ledger; a bot is a sentence and a watch, and a directory
each would mean a creation step before anything can be said. sharing it makes
the list free — every bot is a chat in that cwd, so the header's picker is the
list of bots.
it earns NO permission of its own. /bots rides `chat`, because a bot adds no
surface: same routes, same socket, same confinement. the registry says so
rather than leaving the next reader to wonder.
the brief is the feature. it tells the agent to arm on the FIRST message and
not interview — pick a sensible interval, arm, say what you armed in one line,
and let the owner correct it, which is cheaper for them than three questions.
it says the owner will never say "notify" or "nudge" and must not have to. it
forbids the loop that wakes on a timer to look for itself, which is the
expensive mistake available here. and it draws the line: a bot watches and
tells, it does not fix — a request for work is a commander, say so and stop.
bots joins commanders and plugins in confineUserTree, third time: a member's
bot runs as the member and a 700 service-user directory kills the turn on its
own cwd.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Officer-Session: 656f5c85-e49a-4f1f-b9f3-042a04b4d043
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5