Aeon

Aeon is an agent that runs on the user's own GitHub repo via Actions. A skill is a Markdown file (skills/<name>/SKILL.md); aeon.yml says which ones run and when.

Pick the mode they're asking for:

Preflight (every mode)

1. Find the repo: current dir → gh repo set-default → ask. Clone it if it isn't local.

2. Confirm gh points at THEIR instance, before any command that writes.

   gh repo view --json nameWithOwner -q .nameWithOwner
   

   If that prints aeonfun/aeon and they aren't working on upstream itself, stop and run gh repo set-default <owner>/<repo>. gh prefers an upstream remote over origin when no default is pinned, and every Aeon write (auth, secrets set, skills run, config pushes) is a gh -R <resolved> call — so it will cheerfully put their API keys on the upstream repo and dispatch runs there. It looks like success: no error, a real run id, and the skill just never fires on their instance.

3. gh auth status — everything routes through gh. If it fails, tell them to run gh auth login and stop.

4. Use the ./aeon CLI for all config writes. It preserves comments in aeon.yml and validates. Never hand-edit the YAML — with one exception: the CLI cannot create an entry for a brand-new skill (see Mode 4 step 4).

Don't trust "disabled" for a skill you just created. The read path lists skills from disk and defaults a missing aeon.yml entry to enabled: false, so "not configured" and "disabled" look identical. One command tells them apart:

comm -23 <(ls skills/*/SKILL.md | cut -d/ -f2 | sort) \
         <(grep -oE '^  [a-z0-9-]+:' aeon.yml | tr -d ' :' | sort)

Anything it prints is on disk but unconfigured. Orientation — what's installed, what's on, and where everything lives: references/layout.md.

Setting any key or token: read references/secrets.md — it has every secret and repo variable with the exact page to get it from. Always set secrets with ./aeon secrets set NAME --stdin, never as a command argument.

Mode 1 — Start on Aeon

Goal: one real notification in their phone, fast. Do not configure a schedule first.

1. Get a repo. Ask public or private before you run anything — it changes the command, and switching later means moving the repo.

   Public (recommend this): Actions minutes are free, and upstream skill updates arrive with one command.

   gh repo fork aeonfun/aeon --clone && cd aeon
   gh repo set-default <owner>/aeon        # REQUIRED — see below
   

   Private: a fork of a public repo is always public, so a private instance is a mirror, not a fork.

   gh repo create <name> --private
   git clone --bare https://github.com/aeonfun/aeon.git
   git -C aeon.git push --mirror https://github.com/<owner>/<name>.git
   rm -rf aeon.git && git clone https://github.com/<owner>/<name>.git && cd <name>
   git remote add upstream https://github.com/aeonfun/aeon.git
   gh repo set-default <owner>/<name>      # REQUIRED — see below
   

   Say both costs out loud before they pick private: Actions minutes bill against the account quota (2,000/mo on Free — scheduled skills burn it), and updates come from git fetch upstream && git merge upstream/main instead of gh repo sync.

   Pin the default repo before any other command — both paths. Both end up with an upstream remote (gh repo fork --clone adds one for you), and with no default pinned gh prefers upstream over origin. Everything in Aeon routes through gh -R $(gh repo view …), so an unpinned checkout silently writes secrets to and dispatches runs against aeonfun/aeon instead of their instance — with no error, because the commands genuinely succeed on the wrong repo. Verify:

   gh repo view --json nameWithOwner -q .nameWithOwner   # must print THEIR repo
   

   Everything after this step is identical either way.

2. Auth a model. At least one is required. Fastest is ./aeon auth --oauth (Claude Pro/Max, opens a browser), or ./aeon auth --key <key>, which detects the provider from the key prefix — sk-ant-oat (OAuth), sk-or- (OpenRouter), bk_ (Bankr), inf_ (Surplus), xai- (Grok); anything else lands in ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.

   UsePod and Venice keys have no prefix and are undetectable, so a bare --key files them as a plain Anthropic key and the run fails later with a confusing auth error. They must be named:

   ./aeon auth --key <token> --provider usepod    # same for venice
   

   --dry-run prints the resolved method=… → secret … without calling gh or claude — worth running whenever the provider is in doubt.

   Don't assume they have a Claude subscription: eight providers work, including OpenRouter, Grok, and crypto-settled gateways. See "Providers and harnesses".

3. Wire one channel. Telegram is the fastest: create a bot with @BotFather, then ./aeon secrets set TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN --stdin and TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID. Skip Discord/Slack/email for now — one channel is enough to prove it works.

4. Run one skill now. Pick it with Mode 6 — ask what they want handled, propose one — then ./aeon skills run <name>. Wait for it, then ./aeon runs logs <id>. They should get a Telegram message.

5. Only then, schedule it. ./aeon skills enable <name> and set a time (see Mode 2).

Good first skills: digest (topic briefing), github-monitor (their repos), heartbeat (already on by default, reports only when something needs attention).

Mode 2 — Reschedule / change the routine

Show them their day as a timeline in their own timezone, not a config file:

07:00  digest           "solana"
09:00  pr-review        your repos
18:00  heartbeat        health check

Build it from ./aeon skills ls --enabled --json. (--enabled matters: plain ls prints a SCHEDULE column for disabled skills too — that's their aeon.yml entry, not proof anything fires.) No CLI, or want the raw file? references/layout.md has grep-only equivalents. Then take plain-language edits and apply them:

Rules:

• All cron in aeon.yml is UTC. Convert from their timezone, and say so: "7am Paris = 0 6 * * * UTC (5am in summer — want it pinned to local time?" There is no local-time option, so if DST matters, tell them which half of the year is off by an hour.

• Confirm back the next 3 fire times in their timezone after any change.

• --dry-run first on anything ambiguous, show the diff, then apply.

• Changes need a push to take effect. The CLI does it; confirm it landed.

• Then check the value came out quoted — one grep, every time:

  grep '^  <skill>:' aeon.yml
  

  The scheduler only reads schedule: "…" with double quotes. The CLI writes a new key unquoted, so an entry that had no schedule: yet comes back as schedule: 0 12 * * * and the skill is skipped forever. Details below.

Skills with schedule: workflow_dispatch are on-demand only — they never fire on cron. reactive ones fire on conditions, not time.

Mode 3 — Unblock

"It didn't run." Check in this order and stop at the first hit:

1. Is it on? ./aeon skills ls --enabled — is it listed?

2. Duplicate key? node scripts/validate-config.js. A repeated skill name in aeon.yml silently shadows the first one. Common after hand-edits.

3. Is it even cron? workflow_dispatch and reactive never fire on a schedule.

4. Are Actions disabled? gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/permissions. GitHub auto-disables scheduled workflows after 60 days of repo inactivity — this silently kills forks and nothing in Aeon surfaces it. Re-enable in repo Settings.

5. Is the schedule quoted? grep '^ <skill>:' aeon.yml — the value must be schedule: "0 12 * * *", with double quotes.

   schedule: "0 12 * * *"   ✅ fires
   schedule: 0 12 * * *     ❌ never fires, no error anywhere
   

   scheduler.yml matches schedules with the bash regex schedule: *"([^"]+)". An unquoted value doesn't match, $SCHED is empty, and the match loop hits [ -z "$SCHED" ] && continue — skipped silently, every tick, forever.

   How it gets that way: the CLI edits aeon.yml through a YAML document model that preserves an existing quoted node but writes a newly added key in plain style. So ./aeon skills schedule <name> "0 12 * * *" is safe on an entry that already had a quoted schedule:, and quietly breaks one that didn't. Same for a first-time --var.

   Nothing else detects this. The file is valid YAML, validate-config.js reports CLEAN, and ./aeon skills ls --enabled lists the skill with its schedule — because they all parse YAML properly and only the scheduler uses a regex. Fix by adding the quotes by hand.

6. Did it run and fail? ./aeon runs ls then ./aeon runs logs <id>. A failed skill retries after a 30-minute cooldown.

Three more, if the above are clean:

• It ran against the wrong repo. The giveaway is a command that reported success with a run id, but ./aeon runs ls on their instance shows nothing. gh prefers upstream over origin when no default is pinned, so an unpinned checkout sends every write to aeonfun/aeon.

  gh repo view --json nameWithOwner -q .nameWithOwner   # if this isn't their repo:
  gh repo set-default <owner>/<repo>
  

  Then clean up what landed upstream — re-running against the right repo does not undo it. Any key set while mispointed is now a secret on someone else's repo:

  gh secret list -R aeonfun/aeon      # timestamps matching the misfire = theirs
  

  Rotate it at the provider first, always — it sat on a repo whose collaborators can land a workflow that reads it. Then re-set it on their instance with ./aeon secrets set NAME --stdin.

  Don't blind-delete it. gh secret list shows only last-updated, so it cannot tell you whether the upstream repo already had that secret and the misfire overwrote it. Ask before removing:

  • Upstream never had it → gh secret delete <NAME> -R <upstream>.
  • Upstream had its own → deleting breaks their scheduled runs. The owner must re-set upstream's own value; the overwrite is not reversible from here.

  If the delete 403s, they never had write access — nothing was ever written, and the earlier command failed while only looking fine.

• Missing secret. Skills declare keys in requires:. Check them against ./aeon secrets ls --set. A missing optional key (KEY?) means it degrades quietly, not that it breaks.

• "No MCP tools available." On the Claude harness a single unresolved ${VAR} in .mcp.json disables every MCP server for that run, not just the broken one (::warning::.mcp.json references secret(s) not set: … Skipping MCP this run.). Grok degrades per-server instead. If an OAuth server broke a run after working, suspect a rotated refresh token that couldn't be saved — references/mcp.md.

• It ran but sent nothing. That's usually correct. Aeon's convention is silence on no signal — a clean run sends nothing rather than an empty report.

Note: GitHub only delivers ~10% of */5 cron ticks, so the scheduler catches up missed slots for up to 12 hours. A skill firing 40 minutes late is normal.

Mode 4 — Turn this chat into a skill

They just did something in Claude Code and want it to happen on a schedule.

1. Write the skill file. skills/<name>/SKILL.md — frontmatter, then the prompt. Derive it from what actually happened in the session:

   • the prompt body = what they asked for, plus the steps that worked
   • mode: = read-only unless it needs to commit or open PRs
   • requires: = any API key the work hit (KEY? if it can degrade without it)
   • category: = one of core evolution basics dev crypto productivity
   • if they liked the output, paste a trimmed sample into the body as the format spec

2. Fix the three things that break unattended runs:

   • Nobody's there. Any point where you asked them a question has to become a default or a rule.
   • Stay silent on nothing. Add an explicit "if there's nothing worth reporting, log and exit without notifying." Otherwise it gets muted in a week.
   • Don't repeat yesterday. Add "check the last 3 days of memory/logs/ and skip anything already reported."

3. Check it can actually run there. No local filesystem, no logged-in tools. If the session read their home directory or used a local MCP server, say so plainly — that part won't work unattended unless it's wired as a repo secret / .mcp.json. Wiring an MCP server for unattended use (dashboard Connect, OAuth refresh, the rotating-token PAT): references/mcp.md.

4. Add the aeon.yml entry yourself. A new skill on disk has no entry, and ./aeon skills enable|schedule will not create one — they only flip entries that already exist, and report no change — already in that state, which is false. Add it by hand, disabled, before the fallback heartbeat: line:

     my-skill: { enabled: false, schedule: "0 12 * * *" }
   

   Include the quoted schedule: even though it's disabled — the quotes are load-bearing. Writing a bare { enabled: false } and letting ./aeon skills schedule add the key later produces an unquoted value the scheduler cannot read, and the skill never fires (Mode 3, check 5). Seeding a quoted node here means every later CLI edit preserves the quotes.

   Match the inline { … } form the other 61 entries use, on one line. aeon.yml:367 reads per-skill model:/harness: overrides with a single-line grep, so an entry split across lines takes the global default instead.

   This is the one sanctioned exception to "never hand-edit the YAML". Validate after: node scripts/validate-config.js — but note it only checks structure, and will not catch an unquoted value.

5. Regenerate BOTH catalogs, then ship it as a PR. A new skill trips four CI gates. Run them locally — nothing blocks a merge on red, main is unprotected and has no rulesets, so an unrun gate just fails after the fact:

   bash scripts/check-skill-categories.sh   # category is one of the six
   node scripts/okf-validate.mjs            # SKILL.md carries type: Skill
   bin/generate-skills-json                 # catalog/skills.json
   bin/generate-packs-json                  # catalog/packs.json — NOT optional
   

   generate-packs-json is the one everyone forgets: catalog/skills.json is itself a trigger path for ci-packs-json, so committing the skills catalog without the pack catalog goes red on a workflow you never touched. Commit both files.

   Full gate list, triggers, and the ci-tests / ci-apps commands: references/ci.md.

6. Run it once (./aeon skills run <name>), show them the output, then schedule it via Mode 2.

Skill file shape

---
type: Skill
name: My Skill
category: basics
description: One line — what it does and what it sends.
var: ""
tags: [content]
mode: read-only
requires: [SOME_API_KEY?]
---

Today is ${today}. <the prompt — plain instructions, including judgment calls>

## Steps
1. <the procedure — 43 of 65 skills lead with this>

## Network note
<curl / WebFetch / `./secretcurl` / `gh api` — how this skill fetches>

## Log
Report via `./notify` (use `./notify -f file.md` for anything multi-line).
Send nothing if there's nothing worth reporting.
Append what you did to `memory/logs/${today}.md` under a `### <skill-name>` heading.

Bodies run 133–757 lines (~306 median) — a skill is a prompt in prose, not a config file. ## Steps / ## Network note / ## Constraints / ## Log is the house shape.

Four things that bite when authoring — full detail in references/skill-anatomy.md:

• requires: parses an inline array only. requires: [KEY?] works; a YAML list (- KEY on its own line) silently injects nothing. It's a least-privilege allowlist — the run exports only what's named here.
• A typo'd mode: grants write. Unknown values fall back to write, never to the safer tier. The exact string is read-only.
• ${today} / ${var} are not templated. Nothing rewrites SKILL.md; the workflow puts the date and var in the surrounding prompt and the model resolves them in context. Inventing ${my_thing} yields a literal ${my_thing}.
• Never put a secret on a command line. Use ./secretcurl with a {ENV_NAME} placeholder in braces — Claude Code's permission analyzer blocks $SECRET expansions at run time.

Schedules do not go in SKILL.md — they live in aeon.yml. 10 upstream skills carry a schedule: or cron: frontmatter line anyway; nothing reads it (scheduler.yml parses aeon.yml only). Don't copy that pattern, and don't trust one you find — check aeon.yml.

Mode 5 — Change what an existing skill does

"Make the digest shorter", "stop covering X", "add a source". More common than authoring a new skill.

First, check whether it's a config change, not a file edit. Most skills take a topic, filter, or mode through var — read the skill's var: line and the comment on its aeon.yml entry before touching the body. If var covers it, you're done:

./aeon skills set digest --var "rust"          # no file edit at all

Otherwise edit skills/<name>/SKILL.md:

1. Read the whole body first. These files run long (200–750 lines) and carry judgment rules, exit taxonomies, and scoring rubrics that a targeted edit can silently contradict.
2. Don't strip the survival machinery. Whatever else changes, the skill must keep: the ./notify path, the silent-on-no-signal exit, the memory/logs/${today}.md append under ### <skill-name>, and any already-reported dedup. Edits that "tighten" a skill often delete these. The ### <skill-name> heading is parsed by the health loop and the dedup rule reads the last 3 days of logs — breaking either makes the skill re-report until it gets muted. Conventions in references/skill-anatomy.md.
3. Update frontmatter if the behaviour moved. A new data source that needs a key → add it to requires:. Now writes files or opens PRs → mode: write. Changed description:, name:, category: or requires: → regenerate both catalogs (bin/generate-skills-json && bin/generate-packs-json) and commit both; skills.json carries those fields and feeds packs.json. See references/ci.md.
4. Warn if it's an upstream skill. Anything shipped in aeonfun/aeon will conflict on the next git merge upstream/main. Fine, but say so — the two-repo convention is to keep local edits deliberate and few.
5. Run it once (./aeon skills run <name>) and read the output before leaving.

Automated alternative: the in-repo autoresearch skill evolves a target skill by generating four scored variations and shipping the winner as a PR. Reach for it when the ask is "make this better" rather than a specific change.

Mode 6 — "What should I turn on?"

The real first question during onboarding. Don't dump the catalog. Ask two or three questions about what they actually want handled while they're away, then propose three skills with a one-line reason each.

Three at a time, not twelve. Every enabled skill is a recurring notification, and the fastest way to kill an instance is to make it noisy on day one. heartbeat is already on and stays silent unless something needs attention.

./aeon skills ls                 # all skills — SKILL / ON / SCHEDULE / PACK / DESC
./aeon skills ls --enabled       # only what actually runs
./aeon skills ls --pack crypto   # one pack
./aeon skills <name>             # one skill's detail
./aeon packs ls                  # the six first-party packs

ls footers with 65 skills · 1 enabled — read it to them before proposing anything. First run installs the CLI runtime (tsx + yaml, ~12MB); the npm noise is one-time and expected. Grep-only equivalents: references/layout.md.

Packs are a visibility filter, not a runtime switch — revealing one runs nothing. Core (11), Evolution (8) and Basics (15) show by default; Dev (10), Crypto (13) and Productivity (8) are on demand.

Reasonable starting sets:

Installing more

bin/install-skill-pack --list             # browse the community registry
bin/install-skill-pack <owner>/<repo>     # install a curated pack
bin/add-skill <owner>/<repo> --list       # any repo containing SKILL.md files

Everything lands disabled, security-scanned, with provenance in skills.lock.

Read a community SKILL.md before enabling it. Installing a pack means running a stranger's prompt with your secrets injected. The scanner is regex — it can't catch prompt injection. Check that requires: matches the stated job, that capabilities: is honest, and that nothing instructs the agent to send data somewhere unrelated.

Confirm explicitly before enabling anything with real-world blast radius: distribute-tokens (sends USDC), schedule-ads (spends money), send-email and vuln-scanner (contact real people), deploy-prototype and feature (push to other people's repos).

Mode 7 — Strategy and voice

Two files that ride in the context of every run. Neither is required, both are cheap, and they move output quality more than any per-skill tuning.

STRATEGY.md — the north star

Imported into CLAUDE.md, so it's in every skill's context: goal, priorities, audience, hard constraints. When a choice isn't otherwise determined, this breaks the tie. Keep it tight (it costs tokens on every single run) and specific (a vague strategy can't break a tie).

./aeon strategy show
./aeon strategy set --file STRATEGY.md
./aeon strategy build "<one-line goal>"    # dispatches the strategy-builder skill

build reads the brief plus the repo README and memory/MEMORY.md, then commits a draft. It runs as an Action, so pull once it finishes. No API key needed.

soul/ — how it sounds

By default Aeon has no personality. soul/SOUL.md (identity, worldview, opinions) and soul/STYLE.md (voice, vocabulary, anti-patterns) are read on every run, so notifications and content sound like the operator. soul/examples/ holds 10–20 calibration samples.

./aeon soul show
./aeon soul build --handle <x-handle> --name "<Full Name>" --links <url,url>

XAI_API_KEY gives the richest read of a real X timeline; without it, soul-builder falls back to web search. There's also a gallery of complete example souls at github.com/aeonfun/soul.md to start from.

The quality bar: specific enough to be wrong. "I think most AI safety discourse is galaxy-brained cope" is useful. "I have nuanced views on AI safety" is not. Push for the first kind — a soul that can't offend anyone won't sound like anyone.

Neither file takes type: frontmatter — both are outside the OKF scope.

Providers and harnesses

Two independent axes. Don't confuse them: the gateway decides which model answers; the harness decides which CLI runs the skill.

Gateway — what powers Claude Code

Set a secret and it's live. aeon.yml ships gateway: { provider: auto }, which resolves at run time from whichever keys exist, in this priority order:

claude → anthropic → openrouter → bankr → usepod → venice → surplus → grok

direct is not a hop in that chain — it's the placeholder when none of the eight secrets is set. It requires nothing and configures nothing, so the run proceeds on whatever ANTHROPIC_* env happens to exist and otherwise fails at the first model call. "Resolved to direct" in a log means no key was found, not that a fallback worked.

It runs as a cascade, not a single choice: the highest-priority key goes first, and on any failure (no credits, rate limit, outage, dud response) the run falls over to the next provider whose key is set. It only errors if every one fails. The log prints Routing attempt via '<provider>' per hop.

• Reorder: repo variable GATEWAY_ORDER (space-separated names).
• Pin one (disables failover): ./aeon config set gateway <name>.
• Any Anthropic-compatible endpoint: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY plus the repo variable ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL — e.g. https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic.

Harness — which CLI runs the skill

claude (default) or grok. The Grok harness runs the grok CLI instead of Claude Code and bypasses the gateway entirely — it has its own auth.

• Set it: ./aeon config set harness grok globally, or harness: "grok" on a single skill's aeon.yml entry — quoted, on the entry's one inline line. Per-skill model: and harness: are read by a single-line grep that requires double quotes (aeon.yml:367, :380), so an unquoted or line-split override is silently ignored and the skill keeps running the global default — no error, and the log's model= line looks normal. After setting either by CLI, re-read the entry and add the quotes if they're missing.
• Auth: XAI_API_KEY, or an X account (SuperGrok / X Premium+) via the dashboard's Connect X account, which stores GROK_CREDENTIALS. There is no CLI flag for the X OAuth flow — send them to ./aeon (the dashboard) for that one.
• Models: grok-4.5 (default, reasoning) or grok-composer-2.5-fast (cheap).
• No free tier.

Tell them up front:

• Grok runs report 0 tokens — its JSON carries no token counts, so cost tracking reads blank. Not a bug.
• The X OAuth session expires. If unattended runs start failing on auth, reconnect.
• mode: read-only still applies (maps to --sandbox read-only), and MCP works.

Per-skill grok knobs, in SKILL.md frontmatter (ignored on the Claude harness): max_turns (default 60), best_of_n, verify, and effort (low|medium|high|xhigh|max — reasoning models only; grok-composer-2.5-fast rejects it).