name: dream description: 'Run overnight compounding sessions.' skill_api_version: 1 user-invocable: true context: window: fork intent: mode: task sections: exclude: [TASK] intel_scope: topic metadata: tier: session stability: experimental output_contract: "Dream report artifacts at .agents/overnight//summary.{json,md}, per-iteration cycle history at .agents/overnight//<runID>/iterations/iter-<N>.json (resumed runs rehydrate from disk), and optional scheduler assistance under .agentops/generated/dream/"

Dream - Private Overnight Operator Mode

/dream is the interactive face of the Dream system. It should drive the same engine as ao overnight; do not invent a parallel workflow.

Purpose

Use Dream to:

• preview or persist Dream setup and scheduler assistance
• run a bounded private overnight compounding pass against the real .agents/ corpus
• render and interpret the latest morning report, including Dream Council and DreamScape sections
• explain the difference between the private local Dream lane and the public nightly proof harness

Routing

Map user intent to one of three lanes:

Compounding Loop (v2)

Dream v2 runs a bounded outer loop of INGEST -> REDUCE -> MEASURE iterations until a halt condition fires: wall-clock budget exhausted, plateau (K sub-epsilon deltas in a row), regression beyond a per-metric floor, or metadata integrity failure. Each iteration is atomic and checkpointed so any rollback leaves the corpus clean. Dream is strictly knowledge-only.

Anti-goals (hard constraints):

• NEVER mutates source code.
• NEVER invokes /rpi or any code-mutating flow.
• NEVER performs git operations (no commits, branches, push, rebase, checkout).
• NEVER creates symlinks anywhere.
• No swarm/gc agent fan-out inside iterations. Bounded in-process read-only finding generators may run concurrently during INGEST, but REDUCE remains the single serialized writer for .agents/rpi/next-work.jsonl.

Tier 1 Curator And Trigger Mesh

Dream can expose a local Tier 1 curator through dream.local_curator.*. The first supported shape is Ollama + Gemma, backed by an operator-owned worker directory such as D:\dream and a vault such as D:\vault. This is not a Dream Council runner: Gemma drafts, lints, triages, and writes auditable queue or event records; Codex and Claude remain Tier 2 review/synthesis runners; humans own promotion into durable authored memory.

Use ao overnight curator status --json to check the worker, queue, model, and Ollama endpoint. Use ao overnight curator enqueue --kind lint-wiki|dream-seed or --kind ingest-claude-session --source <path> --chunk-start <n> --chunk-end <n> only for allowlisted knowledge jobs. Use ao overnight curator event when Gemma or a local SOC signal needs Tier 2 attention. Events carry source, severity, desired action, escalation target, and budget; no runner should recursively invoke another runner without consuming an explicit event budget and leaving a ledger entry.

Key Rules

• Keep the shared control plane authoritative. Dream settings live under dream.*; do not duplicate config logic inside the skill.
• Keep platform semantics honest. Never promise scheduled execution on a sleeping laptop.
• Keep the first slice bounded. Dream is for close-loop, defrag preview, metrics, retrieval proof, optional briefing, and optional artifact-mediated council synthesis.
• Do not imply tracked source-code edits overnight unless the runtime actually supports them.
• GitHub nightly is the public proof harness. Dream is the private local engine.

Execution Steps

Step 1: Resolve the operator lane

Interpret the request as setup, start, or report.

Examples:

/dream setup
/dream setup --apply --runner codex --runner claude --at 01:30
/dream start "close the loop on today's auth work"
/dream report
/dream report --from .agents/overnight/latest

Step 2: Setup lane

Use ao overnight setup to inspect the host, available runtimes, scheduler mode, and keep-awake behavior.

ao overnight setup
ao overnight setup --apply --runner codex --runner claude --at 01:30

Default behavior:

• Preview first when the user asks how Dream would work on this machine.
• Persist with --apply only when the user explicitly asks to save config or generate scheduler artifacts.

Expected outputs:

• a config preview in terminal, JSON, or YAML
• optional generated scheduler assistance under .agentops/generated/dream/
• optional dream.local_curator config when a supported local curator is configured or detected

Step 2a: Local curator lane

Use ao overnight curator when the user asks about Gemma, the local worker, the SOC trigger path, or Tier 1 drafts.

ao overnight curator status --json
ao overnight curator diagnose
ao overnight curator enqueue --kind lint-wiki
ao overnight curator enqueue --kind dream-seed
ao overnight curator compact --dry-run
ao overnight curator event --source local-soc --severity high --desired-action "review alert cluster" --budget 1

Do not promote Tier 1 drafts directly into authored content. Treat draft promotion as Tier 2 or human review work.

Step 3: Bedtime run lane

Use ao overnight start for the actual local run.

ao overnight start --goal "close the loop on today's auth work"
ao overnight start --goal "stabilize release follow-ups" --runner codex --runner claude --creative-lane
/dream start --queue=.agents/dream/tonight.md
/dream start --max-iterations=3
/dream start --warn-only=false

Expected behavior:

• operates against the real repo-local .agents corpus
• writes summary.json and summary.md
• degrades honestly when soft-fail steps or keep-awake helpers are unavailable

Step 4: Morning report lane

Use ao overnight report to render the latest Dream result.

ao overnight report
ao overnight report --from .agents/overnight/latest
ao overnight report --from .agents/overnight/latest/summary.json

Focus the response on four questions:

1. What state did I wake up to?
2. What ran overnight?
3. What degraded or failed?
4. What should I do first?

Output

• Dream setup preview or persisted dream.* config with optional scheduler assistance artifacts
• Dream morning report artifacts:
  • .agents/overnight/<run>/summary.json
  • .agents/overnight/<run>/summary.md
• A concise operator summary with degraded items and the single highest-signal next action
• v2 morning reports also include per-iteration sub-summaries, composite fitness_delta, and plateau_reason / regression_reason when applicable

Examples

Help me get Dream working on this Mac without pretending launchd survives sleep.

Run Dream tonight with Codex and Claude, goal: stabilize the Homebrew release follow-up.

Read the latest Dream report and tell me the first move.

Reference Documents

• Dream Run Contract
• Dream Report Contract
• How It Works
• CLI Reference

Troubleshooting

Delineation vs /evolve

Dream owns the knowledge compounding layer; /evolve owns the code compounding layer. Both share fitness-measurement substrate via corpus.Compute / ao goals measure. Run Dream overnight, then start each day with /evolve against the freshly-compounded corpus with a clean fitness baseline.

See Also

• /handoff - capture explicit session closeout before bedtime
• /status - inspect the current repo state before deciding whether to run Dream
• /compile - compile the knowledge corpus when the morning report points at corpus hygiene work
• /rpi - run the daytime delivery flow before handing work off to Dream