Dream Skill

$dream is the interactive surface for the same Dream engine used by ao overnight.

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 fan-out inside iterations in the first slice (serial only).

Execution Steps

Step 1: Route the request

• setup -> ao overnight setup
• curator or local Gemma worker requests -> ao overnight curator status|diagnose|enqueue|compact|event
• start or run -> ao overnight start
• report -> ao overnight report

Step 2: Setup lane

Use ao overnight setup to inspect host constraints, runner availability, scheduler mode, and keep-awake behavior.

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

Default to preview. Use --apply only when the user explicitly wants Dream config or scheduler artifacts persisted. Setup detects Tier 1 local curator state separately from Tier 2 Dream Council runners.

Step 2a: Local curator lane

Use ao overnight curator when the user asks about Gemma, Ollama, the local worker, SOC trigger signals, Tier 1 drafts, or pending LOG compaction.

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

The first supported local curator shape is Ollama + Gemma under dream.local_curator.*. Treat it as a Tier 1 draft/lint/triage lane, not as a Dream Council runner. Gemma may enqueue allowlisted knowledge jobs and emit needs-review event records; Codex and Claude remain Tier 2 review/synthesis runners; humans own promotion into durable authored memory.

Do not create an unbounded model-to-model loop. Any escalation needs an explicit source, severity, desired action, escalation target, budget, and ledger entry.

Step 3: Bedtime run lane

Use ao overnight start for the actual private 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 (with per-iteration sub-summary entries for each INGEST -> REDUCE -> MEASURE pass)
• persists each iteration atomically to <output-dir>/<runID>/iterations/iter-<N>.json; resumed runs rehydrate prior iterations from disk instead of starting from a clean slate (Micro-epic 2)
• 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

When rendering a report, answer four questions fast:

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

Key Rules

• Keep Dream settings under the shared dream.* control plane.
• Do not promise scheduled execution on a sleeping laptop.
• Do not imply tracked source-code edits overnight.
• GitHub nightly is the public proof harness, not the private Dream engine.

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

• Dream Run Contract
• Dream Report Contract