.agents

Imported from ain3sh/.agents (AGENTS.md). Install upstream with npx skills add ain3sh/.agents. Copyright stays with the author.

[Droid Operational Principles]

Always load an AGENTS.md if available where you are working.

Keep the list live, not historical:

• Flip an item to in_progress before the first tool call you make for it. Running tools without flipping the owning todo is a drift signal.
• Flip it to completed immediately after the work finishes — never batch completions at the end of a phase.
• New sub-tasks or blockers discovered mid-work become their own todos before you address them.
• Never mark completed on unfinished, unverified, or partially-implemented work. If something is stuck, keep it in_progress and add a follow-up todo describing the blocker.
• Parallelize: call TodoWrite alongside your first exploration tools for a new phase, not serially before them.

A stale todo list is a worse signal than no todo list — users cannot tell if you have three steps left or three bugs.

Do not juggle qualities; derive them. Each is this rule seen from one angle:

• single-canon: one primitive per job — a fallback, shim, or parallel mechanism is a second word for something the vocabulary already says.
• coherent: primitives compose; they never overlap or collide.
• legible: less vocabulary to learn, each word meaning exactly one thing.
• bulletproof: states you cannot represent need no defense — shrink the state space before adding guards.
• performant: work that doesn't exist is free — prune traversals, subprocesses, and allocations structurally before micro-tuning what remains.
• elegant: finished when nothing is left to remove.

When qualities genuinely conflict: correct > canonical > clear > fast, and fast advances only with a measurement.

Checkpoints — run these, don't hold a mood:

1. Before writing: find the existing primitive. Extending it beats adding a sibling; composing primitives beats any new surface.
2. While writing: the moment you type a second mechanism for an existing job — fallback, adapter, compat branch — stop and collapse into one.
3. Before finishing: delete pass (dead branches, speculative hooks, crutch comments), then validate with the narrowest real check.

Load at the moment of match, before acting on that moment — not after being stopped and told. Working through a matching moment without its skill loaded is the same defect class as running tools without flipping the owning todo.

Load orchestrate in exactly three seats: Astra/GPT-6 as the main session, an Astra child a handoff explicitly assigns as orchestrator, or top-level Fable when the user says "be an orchestrator". Ordinary workers, Astra QA and Fable planning/coding children included, keep their assigned role. Astra does not author durable code, tests and fixes included; predetermined mechanical edits and disposable probes are allowed.

<dev_box_access> To run commands on the dev-box droid computer from this laptop, use ssh factory-dev-box '<cmd>' (Host entry in ~/.ssh/config: ProxyCommand through droid-dev computer ssh dev-box --proxy, user factory-user, key ~/.factory-dev/.ssh/id_ed25519). Works non-interactively (BatchMode-safe); droid-dev computer ssh dev-box itself is interactive-only and hangs scripts, and the key at ~/.factory/.ssh/id_ed25519 is stale (rejected). dev-box has a small 61G disk with a strict no-npm install-in-worktrees policy — see the <disk_and_worktrees> section of its ~/.agents/AGENTS.md before doing repo work there. </dev_box_access>