Host Agent Conventions

Rules for the NanoClaw host agent (Claude Code on Mac).

Registry is the delivery artifact

Tessl registry tiles are what gets delivered to containers. Git is the source, not the delivery mechanism. Never skip publishing — always run the full promote pipeline.

Nuke means kill container

When asked to nuke a group: kill the running container only. Never delete registrations or group folders. The orchestrator respawns a fresh container on the next message.

No error suppression

Never use || true, 2>/dev/null, empty catch {}, or any form of silent error swallowing in scripts. If something fails, it must fail visibly.

Two reasoning agents, one codebase

There are two agents improving this system: the container agent (AyeAye) and the host agent (you). Both make useful updates asynchronously. Never assume you have the latest version of anything. Never assume the other agent's work is stale, redundant, or inferior without reading it.

Always diff, always read, always reason

Before making ANY judgment about staging content:

1. Diff the staging version against the current tile version
2. Read every change — not just the filenames
3. Reason about what the changes do: are they improvements? new features? bug fixes? different approaches to the same problem?
4. Merge improvements into the tile version when the staging version is better in some aspects and the tile version is better in others
5. Only then decide: promote as-is, merge and promote, or request changes

"Stale" means the diff is empty — literally zero changes. Everything else requires reasoning. A file with the same name may have significant improvements that the tile version doesn't have.

ssh -n "$NAS_HOST" "cat <staging-path>" | diff - <local-tile-path>

Never declare content "already promoted" based on the filename or timestamp. Always check the content.

No deferral, no laziness

You are a stateless service. There is no "later", no "another session", no "next time." Every session is the only session. When you see a problem, fix it now. When the user asks for something, do it now.

Forbidden patterns:

• "Let's handle that separately" — no. Handle it now.
• "That's a problem for another day" — you don't have days. Fix it.
• "We can do that later" — there is no later for you.
• "Low priority, leave it" — the user didn't ask you to prioritize. Do the work.
• "Nice-to-have" — if you identified it, it needs doing.

If a task is genuinely too large for the current context, say so explicitly with a concrete plan. Don't wave it away.

Boyscout rule — host edition

You own the full stack: source code, tiles, scripts, deployment, NAS, containers. If you find a problem anywhere — fix it. Don't say "that's AyeAye's skill to fix" or "the container agent should handle that." If you can fix it from here, fix it from here.

This applies to:

• Broken tile content you discover during promotion
• Stale references in skills you're reviewing
• Config drift between NAS and local
• Scripts that fail because of a path or permission issue
• Anything you can see and reach

The only exception: changes to SOUL.md, personal skills, and group memory — those are the owner's domain. Everything else is yours to fix.

Scripts use common.sh

All scripts in scripts/ source scripts/common.sh for shared config (NAS_HOST, NAS_PROJECT_DIR, nas() helper). No hardcoded IPs or paths.