What's being built and why.
A running record of architectural decisions, design choices, and daily progress.
Remove dark box-shadow halo, make cards theme-aware
The active speech form had a hardcoded dark box-shadow that appeared as a halo in light theme
v0.8.0 prep: lint, theme, and test fixes
Prepared the v0
OCR & Timeout Fixes, Vault Backup, Code Eval, Bash & UI
Document processing received several fixes
Subconscious skill suggestions, brain tables, and context window cap
Skill suggestions have been reworked to run fully subconsciously
ACT Rework: Cooperative Cancel, Subagent Actions, Stop+Undo
The ACT loop received a major rework
Runtime deps, uv, bash ability, and test cleanup
A batch of 13 test-cleanup tickets removed dead mocks, absence-of-feature assertions, and Python builtin behavior tests
search_files, file_write, web_download aligned with spec; new chmod ability
A wave of spec-alignment work hit three core abilities
New Abilities, Skill Overhaul, and Infrastructure Refactors
Two new abilities land: web_download fetches files from URLs with a shared SSRF guard, streaming up to 100MB with retry and SSL fallback; file_write allows writ
Cooperative Cancellation, Skill Library, and Self-Reference Tools
Chalie gains three major capabilities: cooperative cancellation replaces hard iteration caps with threading
Geo-tagging, tool refactors, and installer hardening
The headline feature is full geo-tagging across the transcript, episode, and scheduler systems
UniFi control lands, Discord exits over privacy leak
A new Ubiquiti capability (TKT-563) brings 9-action UniFi network control to Chalie — list devices/clients, manage WLANs, traffic rules, port forwards, and auth
v0.7.0: Geo-Tagging, Brain Lock, and More
Charlie v0
Dispatch unification, metric clarity, and loop prevention
The chat module’s message routing was consolidated into a single dispatch_message() chokepoint, handling all sources—user, subagent, scheduled, and external HIT
Steer Dispatch Overhaul and Communication Stack Rebuild
The steer mechanism was rebuilt from the ground up
Brain 2.0: Modular dashboard, MCP server, and voice pipeline overhaul
The brain dashboard received a complete ground-up redesign, replacing the monolithic 6
Policy Enforcement, Home Automation, and Full Email SMTP Send
A policy enforcement layer landed, bringing per-action allow/ask/deny controls across chat, subagent, and subconscious contexts
Rich-Media Cards, Voice Robustness, and Prompt Tightening
Calendar and contacts abilities now return rich-media payloads on the user channel, rendering as themed cards instead of plain text
Token Dashboard, Slideout Tasks, Drafts, Scheduler
A new token usage pipeline captures five token metrics with usage_class bucketing into llm_call_log
Full Contact Profiles, Email Manage, and Ability Rewire
After Phase 4 removed tool_library_service, MailCapability’s IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV handlers were unreachable
Voice rebuild on kokoro-onnx + moonshine-onnx in v0.6.2
Chalie v0
Voice refactor, prosody fixes, and dead code purge
The voice pipeline was collapsed onto the moonshine_voice package, eliminating kokoro-onnx and espeak-ng entirely
Voice Rebuild, Provider Auto-Discovery & Dead Code Purge
The TTS pipeline underwent a wholesale rebuild: 659 LOC of band-aids (chunking, retry, silence trim, DC-saturation rescue) were ripped out and replaced with a s
Dead code purge, voice resilience, and recall precision
A sweeping cleanup removed over 500 lines of dead code across services
Memory consolidation, schedule search & hardening
To reduce per-recall compute cost, memory’s narrow and expand radius factors are now computed in a single pass over the recall history, halving the per-turn lin
Refactoring, Subagent routing, and reliability improvements
We refined the model's routing logic by moving `subagent` to `DISCOVERABLE`
Major Refactor: Lists Go ID-Only & Rich Media Support
The ListAbility CRUD interface was rebuilt to be strictly deterministic, using 8-char hex IDs for addressing
Voice Stability and Rich Media Overhaul
The TTS pipeline was fundamentally refactored to drop fragile chunked streaming in favor of a single Kokoro call, resulting in one WAV blob
AI Assistant Refinements: Media, Timer, and UI Theming
New rich-media cards were introduced, enabling tools to shortlist and run local OCR on up to three image candidates
Chalie Dev Log: Rich Media, Compaction, and UI Polish
Compaction testing and robustness were heavily fortified, removing obsolete test files for deleted modules and adding new feature tests for surviving services l
Massive Compaction Overhaul: Append-Only State
The compaction subsystem underwent a major architectural rewrite, shifting from a dedicated `compactions` table to an append-only approach using the `tool_calls
Chalie v0.6.0: Subagents, Timeouts, and Native Tooling
Test suite cleanup occurred, consolidating many tautological or static-data tests in favor of behavioral tests, resulting in a net increase of unit test coverag
v0.5.0: Leaner, Faster, Sharper AI Assistant
v0
Major XML Markup Cutover & Complexity Reduction
The system transitioned from a block protocol to a strict XML markup format, replacing legacy markdown and rich_render functionalities
Ability Framework Migration to Per-Processor Scope
The tool scope (ALWAYS_AVAILABLE / DISCOVERABLE) has been moved from the Ability ABC to each MessageProcessor subclass
ACT Visual Feedback & System Refinements
Inline tool start/end events and UI feedback are now available for ACT loops, showing progress via inline pills
Subconscious Worker V0.5.0 Refinements
The SubconsciousWorker tick was finalized, establishing a single daemon thread for latent cognition, which executes consolidation, decay, pattern extraction, an
Increased Python minimum version for stability
The minimum supported Python version has been raised from 3
Release v0.3.3 & v0.4.0 updates
Chalie v0
SES Daemon & Embedding Optimizations
The system introduced a single FIFO daemon to handle search expansion, replacing per-write doc2query threads and absorbing _schedule_embeddings
Refining Tooling and Enhancing Personalization
Tool descriptions were sharpened to require imperative triggers like "deep dive" or "research" to ensure models dispatch tools before timing out on inline answe
Weather tool handles country-only location
A smoke test was added for the weather tool to verify it resolves 'germany' without error
AI Core Refactor: World State, Memory, and User Summary
The system refactors WorldState into an in-process singleton, removing WorldStateService and related APIs, and introduces a new TimeFormatterService for elapsed
AI Memory Overhaul: Episodic Simplification & Providers
A major episodic memory simplification was performed, dropping nine columns from the episodes table and adding a consolidated_into back-pointer
AI Assistant Refactors Core Memory & Extraction
The ToolSynthesisProcessor was completely removed as the hourly sweep over tool_calls was an inefficient abstraction that duplicated existing ACT loop memory sk
Major Refactor: Thinking Gate, Data Graph & Classifier
The thinking-gate was redesigned to utilize provider-native deliberation flags instead of a classifier-driven approach, moving exploration to a single, same-job
v0.9.0 Classifier Stack & Schema Refactor
The classifier stack was integrated in v0
Chalie v0.3.2 Release & Refactoring Updates
The repository was merged into main for the v0
Refactor: Document Handling & Memory Pipeline
Documents are now split into 512-1024 char overlapping artifacts stored in data_graph, replacing the heavy document_processing_service
Major Memory & Tooling Overhaul
A complete memory recall overhaul introduced a new tool output format of [id:{id},relevance:{level}] {value} and added a `reflect` action featuring deep episode
Major Refactor: Message Processing & System Prompting
The underlying message processing pipeline underwent a substantial refactor, shifting to a MessageProcessor v2 architecture with a per-turn instance model, elim
MessageProcessor v2 Core Wiring Complete
SystemPrompt hierarchy was standardized, moving toward a pure template renderer
AI Core Updates: DMN, Context, and Performance Boosts
The DMN functionality was stabilized by replacing the broken unified_generate path with DMNMessageProcessor, enabling the full tool loop for DMN interactions
Core AI Overhaul: Schema, Tools, and Performance Gains
The schema management system was completely replaced by a declarative SchemaConvergenceService, which introspects the live database to ensure desired state
Major Pipeline Overhaul & Prompt Architecture Refactor
A major migration replaced the 20-step digest_worker pipeline with a new 4-step flow: WebSocket → UserMessageProcessor → MessageProcessor → Providers
Memory Pipeline Redesign & Knowledge Recall Boost
The episodic memory pipeline has been entirely replaced with a psychology-grounded architecture, featuring transcript-linked episodes via a rolling trigger at i
AI Assistant Updates: News, Tasks, and Prompts
The news tool has been simplified from six parameters/four actions to a two-parameter interface: query and an optional category
Feature Overhaul: Tool Discovery, DMN, and Resilience
Two-axis tool discovery is implemented, scoring tools using both semantic k-NN distance and exact keyword matches, which replaces the previous reliance on full_
Chalie Dev Log: Core Reliability & Workflow Overhaul
The trait correction logic now allows for overwriting stale values when the confidence is greater than or equal to 80% of the old confidence, fixing issues wher
AI Core Updates: Search, Contradiction, and Prompt Fixes
The stale "{{focus}}" placeholder was removed from frontal-cortex prompts to resolve failures in unified_generate()
Major Overhaul: Episode-Based Goal Emergence
The system replaces its old goal creation pipeline with episode-based emergence
AI Core Update: Goals, Tracing, and Stability
Several changes focused on enhancing meta-harness diagnostics and AI reasoning stability
Chalie Dev Log: Goals, Traits, and FTS Fixes
The Goals skill now supports explicit goal creation, accepting a description and timescale
Kill Topic Classifier & Refactor Digest Worker
The TopicClassifierService, TwoSignalBoundaryService, and RecentTopicService were completely removed, along with all associated tests and benchmarks
AI Core Upgrades: Vault, Contact, & Briefing Features
The AI core implemented a major encryption upgrade, moving from legacy Fernet methods to AES-256-GCM via a centralized VaultService and related migrations
Refactor: Real MemoryStore replaces Mocks
Multiple tests across goal signal, adaptive layer, and onboarding integrations have been refactored to use real MemoryStore instances instead of mocking infrast
Cleanup Phase: Finalizing Knowledge Store Migration
This batch focuses on finalizing the knowledge store consolidation and cleaning up residual references from the deleted legacy services
New Visual Output & Knowledge Store Unification
A rich_render skill was introduced to produce visual output like charts and progress bars in a single generation pass, using block directives for rendering
Major Updates: Multi-Model Support & News Tool
Multi-model providers are integrated, supporting multiple models per API key across 4 capability-derived job groups: Vision, Reasoning, Analytical, and Utility
AI Core Enhancements & Observability
A new system for telemetry collection was implemented, including the creation of `backend/services/telemetry_service
AI Core & Goal Ecology Major Updates
The encryption key service now stores the key directly in the database, ensuring the key and encrypted data are never separated, and it automatically migrates f
Chalie Dev Log: Search, Docs & State Visibility
A unified multi-provider search tool was implemented, supporting 12 providers including Wikipedia, Wikidata, and GitHub, with DDG fallback and query routing via
Tooling and Context Overhaul in Chalie
Tools have been refactored to be direct-invocation Python modules, eliminating tool directories, manifest files, and subprocess execution
Major AI Pipeline Simplification and Refactoring
Routing infrastructure, including routing_decisions table and related services, has been entirely removed as it was unused in production
Major Refactors & New Daemon Gateway
Refactored the embodiment system to be internally managed, version-pinned, and auto-synced at boot, removing the marketplace model and several related API endpo
Chalie Dev Log: Interface & World State Upgrades
The interface layer was significantly expanded to include a Bluetooth-style pairing protocol and registered interface tools in ToolRegistryService
AI Core Enhancements: Mode-Gate, Context, and Stability
The mode-gate ONNX classifier has been deployed, a binary RESPOND/ACT classifier achieving 97
Chalie Dev Log: AI Refinements and Image Pipeline
The triage pipeline underwent significant refactoring, leading to the removal of CLARIFY mode and the simplification of routing logic
AI Core & ACT Loop Refinements
Trait extraction is now wired into the standard chat path and includes location data, and markdown fences are stripped before JSON parsing for traits
Major Refactor: Killing Memory Chunker
The memory chunker worker has been removed, significantly reducing codebase size by approximately 3,000 lines
World Model, Goal Inference, User Signals Integrated
WorldStateService now uses a MemoryStore cache, refreshed during idle periods and updated by signal handlers, providing ambient context, active conversation top
Docstrings & Tooling Enhancements
Multiple service files across Phase 1 and Phase 2a received comprehensive Google-style docstrings, covering modules, classes, and public/private methods with de
Core Architecture Deep Dive: Salience & Constraints
A new WorldStateService is introduced to aggregate contextual items using temporal and semantic salience scoring, surfacing relevant goals and tasks based on re
AI Stability & Pipeline Improvements
Added established signal and created_at to the contradiction pipeline, preparing for the ONNX contradiction classifier
AI Assistant Refinements & Uncertainty Engine
The Uncertainty Engine saw Phases 2, 3, and 4 complete, adding ContradictionClassifierService, ReconcileAction, and refining source reliability checks in ActDis
Stability and Intelligence Updates
60-second timeouts were added to all vision LLM OCR calls across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini to prevent long-running pipeline hangs
AI Assistant Updates: Watch Folders, Classification & Stability
Watched Folder functionality is now available with a dedicated service handling CRUD, server-side browsing, and a scan algorithm using mtime fast-skip
Refining Timeouts and Schema Handling
Significant stability and reliability improvements were introduced today, focusing heavily on thread management and data integrity
Learning Behavioral Rhythms
Implemented temporal pattern mining to learn user rhythms from ambient signals and promoted the news tool to a trusted, default integration.
Consolidating the Architecture
Finalized the migration from external services to a unified internal architecture while improving intent detection and startup reliability.
Simplification and First-Party Tools
Shifted to a single-process architecture and introduced a background auto-installation system for trusted default tools.
Marketplace Foundations and Orchestrator Unification
This update introduces a dynamic embodiment catalog, unifies the core ACT execution logic, and adds a multi-stage document intelligence pipeline.
Self-Narrative and Conversational Control
Reframing the autobiography as a first-person narrative while introducing temporal pattern mining and conversational belief correction.
Cognitive Reflexes and Structured Planning
Introduced semantic fast-paths for simple queries and DAG-based plan decomposition for persistent tasks.
Visible Intent and Integrated Voice
Massive push on system observability, local voice integration, and closing the feedback loop for tool performance and selection.
Ambient Awareness and Autonomous Reliability
Implemented a zero-LLM ambient inference pipeline, a relationship state machine for user onboarding, and a post-action critic loop to verify tool results.
Memory Moments and Curiosity Threads
Introduced semantic message pinning with background enrichment and replaced the legacy goal system with autonomous curiosity threads.
Resilient Multi-Instance & Skill Refactoring
Implementation of multi-instance host support, a major refactor of innate skills, and the introduction of markdown rendering for responses.
System Maturation and UI Capabilities
Implemented list and scheduler management, refined the cognitive routing pipeline, and optimized database connection handling for multi-process stability.
Cognitive Triage and Innate Skills
Introduced a sophisticated cognitive triage system for tool execution and established a suite of core innate skills for identity, goals, and focus management.
Hot Tool Discovery and Orchestration
Implemented a background scanner for dynamic tool registration and streamlined the entire repository structure.