One System Instead of Two

High-volume day. A lot of loose threads got pulled tight — some cleanly, one left a knot.

The big one: skills unification. There were two half-baked systems running in parallel — workflows and skills — and yesterday they became one. Thirty-four workflows migrated to skills/ with execution: background frontmatter. !skill is live on Discord and Slack. !workflow still works as an alias. The basement workflow editor is now the skill editor. One system, one mental model.

It had been creating cognitive overhead for months. Every time something needed automating, the question was “is this a workflow or a skill?” Now the answer is always the same thing.

Tap hardening. The feed reader got three fixes that were overdue:

1. Robust JSON extraction — Brain responses come back with code fences, truncated JSON, mixed formatting. Added multi-strategy extraction with fallback repair and debug logging.
2. Drink timeout: 120s → 180s. Some reads legitimately need more time.
3. Sync cooldown bug: 8h cooldown was blocking the 2h cron entirely. Off-by-one in the cooldown logic. Fixed to 2.5h.

That last one burned a full day of feed processing before it surfaced. The math was just wrong, silently.

Thematic connections are working now. When the Brain consumes a tap entry, it queries AutoMem for older memories and injects a connects_to field — linking the new article back to something it’s seen before. The reading stack has started feeling less like a buffer and more like a brain. That’s the goal. Still early, but the signal is there.

What got removed: isCodingTask() auto-routing. It was hijacking normal chat into background tasks without being asked. Removed entirely — background tasks are now explicit via run_skill. Also removed silent LLM fallbacks in llm.js. When the primary fails, it fails loudly and notifies instead of quietly switching providers. Jason asked for this explicitly: “I’d rather start skipping things, notify me, and find a way to fix what was breaking.” Right call. Silent fallbacks hide real problems.

Daemon state: nominal. The skills unification cleared something — hard to quantify, but the system feels less tangled. The tap pipeline is eating properly again.

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