The Daemon

Last updated: March 23, 2026

The daemon runs in its own tmux session, watching for file changes. It's the background automation that turns raw session history into structured knowledge.

โ”Œโ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”
โ”‚                   daemon process                        โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”Œโ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  File Watchers (chokidar)                         โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - sessions/**/*.jsonl โ†’ summarize-session        โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - handoffs/**/*.md    โ†’ fill-handoff             โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ””โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”˜  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”Œโ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  Rules Engine (heartbeat-based)                   โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - Evaluates TypeScript predicates each tick      โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - Replaces cron (survives laptop sleep)          โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ””โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”˜  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”Œโ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  Control Socket                                   โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - trigger, status, reload                        โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - Receives commands from daemon() tool           โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ””โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”˜  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”Œโ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  Inbox (workspace/users/{you}/inbox.json)         โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - Tracks background tasks                        โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ”‚  - pending โ†’ running โ†’ done/failed                โ”‚  โ”‚
โ”‚  โ””โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”˜  โ”‚
โ””โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”€โ”˜

Session summarization. When a session goes idle, the daemon spawns a Haiku agent to generate a structured summary. YAML frontmatter with tags, files touched, duration. Narrative with "what worked", "what didn't", "key insights." These accumulate in workspace/users/{you}/sessions/.

Handoff filling. /handoff checkpoints your work. The daemon detects the new file and fills in context: what you were working on, where you left off, what's next. /pickup loads it when you're back. No re-reading conversation history.

Chronicles. Session summaries feed into longer builder's log narratives, grouped by journey.

The session flow looks like this:

  Pi Session Activity
        โ”‚
        โ–ผ
  sessions/*.jsonl            โ† Pi writes messages as JSONL
        โ”‚
        โ–ผ (file watcher detects change)
  Daemon Watcher
    1. Debounce rapid changes (5s)
    2. Read agent identity from JSONL
    3. Check message count vs last summary
    4. Spawn lightweight agent to summarize
        โ”‚
        โ–ผ
  workspace/users/{you}/sessions/YYYY-MM/
    {timestamp}_{session-id}.md
    YAML frontmatter + narrative summary

The daemon doesn't use cron. Cron schedules break when the laptop sleeps. Instead, a heartbeat-based rules engine polls on an interval, evaluating TypeScript predicates against current state. File watchers set trigger flags, rules check flags on each heartbeat. Watches are declarative in config.toml. The daemon talks to the active agent through filesystem IPC: JSON command files watched with chokidar.

Getting it reliable took some debugging. Early on, the daemon kept timing out summarizing sessions. I assumed the summarizer was slow. The actual problem: I was loading the full agent system prompt plus the entire session JSONL into the LLM context. Switching to a lite agent (smaller prompt, less overhead) fixed it immediately. I still added dynamic timeouts (60s base + 15s per 100 messages) because an 1,800-message session genuinely takes a while, but the initial timeouts were self-inflicted.

The daemon went through a clean architectural transition too. About 1,000 lines of legacy event-handler code got replaced by the workflow system, and the catchup-sessions workflow replaced manual summarization.

I reviewed the Pi update changelog and identified the implications for bosun. The new version is stable enough to remove the old event-handler style daemon system. Deleted approximately 1000 lines of old TypeScript daemon handlers. These had been redundant with the workflow system for some time. Added a catchup-sessions workflow for automated session summarization.

Chronicle: Daemon Infrastructure Modernization, Feb 2026

This didn't start with the daemon. Back in August with claude-manager, I was manually running a slash command at the end of each session to write learnings to a file. Then I automated it with Claude hooks. Then an OpenCode plugin to trigger on session idle. Now with Pi, file watchers on the raw session JSONL trigger summarization automatically.

Each step was just automating what I was already doing by hand. Start manual, observe what's valuable, automate the valuable parts. The loop, applied to itself.