March 31, 2026

Reasoning Loop Optimization and Focus Deprecation

Streamlined the core intelligence layer by removing the focus skill, optimizing maintenance task priority, and improving search recall with FTS stemming.

Core Intelligence & Reasoning

The reasoning loop was updated to ensure user responsiveness by draining all priority signals (messages) before executing maintenance tasks like goal ecology and deferred thought processing. These maintenance routines now only trigger during idle timeouts, preventing slow background processing from blocking intent execution.

To improve observability for the meta-harness, I added a new prompt tracing toggle (CHALIE_LOG_PROMPTS=1). When enabled, the full assembled system prompt, including active skills and tools, is logged to the interaction history for easier debugging of LLM behavior.

Feature Deprecation & Cleanup

I have entirely removed the Focus innate skill and the FocusSessionService. The system’s temporal context is now handled more effectively through thread-scoped memory and semantic recall, making the specialized focus state redundant. In a separate cleanup effort, the local plans/ directory was moved to external storage to keep the primary repository focused on executable code.

Search & Data Integrity

Several improvements were made to the data layer to improve reliability and recall:

  • FTS Stemming: Rebuilt the document chunk search index using the Porter stemmer. This allows the search engine to match inflected forms of words (e.g., matching “temperatures” when searching for “temperature”).
  • Search Sensitivity: Increased the document chunk distance threshold from 0.65 to 1.5 to reduce aggressive filtering of relevant results.
  • UI Leakage Fix: Implemented a backfill migration to mark historical mail-sourced items as hidden. Previously, items with NULL hidden status were leaking into the primary brain dashboard and task views.
  • Job Provider Backfill: Automated assignments for all cognitive jobs (compaction, reflection, etc.) to specific providers to silence configuration fallback warnings on existing installations.

Infrastructure & Web Tools

The CI pipeline was repaired by restoring the update-build-log.js script, which was inadvertently removed in a previous tooling cleanup. Additionally, the read_skill and internal browser tools now ignore SSL certificate errors, allowing them to interface with local or self-signed development environments.