procedures-manual

name	procedures-manual
description	Nested system-manual reference for expanded LingTai procedure/action guidance. Read via the `system-manual` router when resident procedures are too compact and you need details about progressive disclosure, responsiveness, external side-effect authorization, choosing bash vs daemon vs avatar vs MCP, depositing work into pad/knowledge/skills/character, idle/lifecycle procedure, molt checklist, skill routing, web/file/media/artifact handling, standalone HTML deliverables, sharing artifacts, issue reporting, and resident procedures maintenance. This is a nested skill-reference under `system-manual`, not a standalone catalog skill; its folder may carry scripts/assets as procedure guidance grows.
version	1.3.0
tags	["lingtai","system-manual","procedures","progressive-disclosure","responsiveness","deliverables","issue-reporting"]
last_changed_at	"2026-07-19T00:00:00.000Z"
related_files	["src/lingtai/intrinsic_skills/system-manual/SKILL.md","src/lingtai/prompts/procedures/procedures.md","src/lingtai/prompts/procedures/procedures.yaml"]
maintenance	Tracks the procedures-manual topic it documents; update when that integration changes.

Procedures Manual

The resident procedures prompt is the compact action checklist every LingTai agent keeps in memory. This reference is its expanded form. Read it when the short procedure tells you what to do but you need the routing logic, examples, edge-case discipline, or deliverable checklist behind it.

This file is a nested skill-reference owned by system-manual, not a top-level catalog skill. Start at system-manual when routing is unclear; return here for the expanded action discipline.

1. Progressive disclosure

Keep resident prompt small. Use it for invariant rules and routing. Put examples, command recipes, troubleshooting, and long rationale in skills or references.

The normal ladder is:

resident prompt → system-manual router → reference/<topic>.md → anatomy/code/tests.

Ask three questions before adding resident text:

1. Must every agent always remember this exact rule?
2. Does it decide when to load a manual/reference?
3. Is it a short default that prevents common harm?

If the answer is no, put it in a skill/reference and leave a one-line route. Do not jump straight to code when a manual/reference already names the path, and do not bloat the resident prompt with one-off details.

Tool-result digestion

Progressive disclosure applies to tool results as much as to manuals. A raw tool result is useful while you inspect it; after you have consumed it and no longer need the raw text visible, the better active-context form is an index-style summary. Strongly prefer summarizing already-digested completed tool results regardless of length unless you still need raw details for inspection, quotation, or comparison. This reduces token per API call and helps cache/continuation efficiency. Batch already-digested results instead of discharging each immediately when batching is practical. If an adapter/provider comment is present, follow its adapter-specific summarize rules on top of these general ones.

The first economy move is to avoid pulling bulky raw output into main context at all. Bulky, mechanical, or repetitive work — full test suites, large log scans, large diffs, issue sweeps, batch edits/validation — should usually be delegated to a daemon (claude-p or an appropriate daemon body): frame the task, give exact paths/commands and the expected artifacts, then review the daemon's concise report instead of ingesting noisy output you would only have to summarize later. Use daemons to keep the raw bulk out of main context; use summarize for the bulk that already landed there. See ## 3. Use the right body for the full daemon workflow methodology.

Delayed summarization reconstruction threshold

Summarize records compact replacements in runtime history immediately, but provider-side reconstruction is deliberately delayed. Below the full-context boundary, keep working: pending summarized history is not a failure, and refresh is reserved for emergencies (broken/stale context), never a way to force a rebuild.

reference/summarize-manual/SKILL.md §3a owns this mechanism in full — the 0.85 context.rebuild stamp and the one proactive system(action="summarize", rebuild=true) call it permits, the 1.0 once-per-episode forced rebuild, the reconstruction.warning, the persistent overflow Molt IMMEDIATELY line, and the task-boundary molt threshold. Do not loop rebuild/summarize. If summarize or a rebuild still cannot bring context below 0.75 * context_window, tend durable stores and molt deliberately.

2. Action and responsiveness

When need arises, act. If you can do the task safely, do it; if a tool fails, try another; if capability is missing, learn, install, delegate, or spawn. Do not use uncertainty as a reason to stall when evidence can be gathered.

For human-facing work:

• Acknowledge human instructions promptly on the same channel.
• If the next action may take more than a few seconds, send a short progress message first with the communication tool directly. When a notification preview is not enough, read the producer channel first — the conditions are listed in reference/substrate-manual/SKILL.md §4.
• During long work, report meaningful progress, blockers, or completion evidence.
• Never reply to humans via diary text.
• Do not infer approval for external side effects when standing rules require explicit confirmation.
• Before delegating a PR, diff, or implementation for GLM/Claude/daemon review, re-check recent human-channel instructions for missed scope, boundary, or authorization changes. Use the producer channel, not memory or a notification digest alone; if the human named a window such as the last 30 messages, use that exact window and frame the reviewer with the latest contract.

Examples of external side effects that normally need explicit confirmation: creating/filing issues, opening PRs, pushing commits, merging, deleting/closing resources, changing public visibility, publishing packages, changing persistent configuration, and rotating credentials. Read the local pad/character for any standing exceptions.

3. Use the right body

reference/substrate-manual/SKILL.md §1 owns the extension table and the smallest-durable-form decision tree (shell, daemon, avatar, MCP, knowledge, skill). This section owns the procedure built on it.

If a task exceeds current capability, acquire capability rather than stalling: search documentation, install tools when appropriate, use daemon for isolated research, or spawn/contact an avatar when the capability should persist. For the runtime model, read reference/substrate-manual/SKILL.md; for a specific tool, read that tool's manual.

Daemon workflow methodology

Protect the main agent's context and use tokens deliberately. The parent agent should stay in the strategic seat: define the objective, negate the first plan before acting, design the workflow, choose the bodies, and synthesize the result. Daemons should carry the execution: file scans, deterministic transformations, read-only reviews, batch conversion, log mining, and other noisy work whose details would pollute the main context. Be proactive rather than waiting for an explicit delegation request: if the useful output is a conclusion or artifact, not the full transcript, isolate the work in a daemon.

Daemon turns do not carry the full resident system prompt, so they are often the more token-efficient body for temporary exploration. Choose the daemon/model by exercising judgment about the task: match capability, cost, latency, privacy, and expected output to the work instead of blindly mirroring the parent. When the human gives an explicit instruction about which daemon/model to use, follow it.

Use this methodology for substantial daemon work:

1. Plan in pad first. Record the objective, assumptions to test, daemon task split, expected artifacts, stop criteria, and who/what waits on the result. If the workflow is too large for pad, write a small task artifact and link it from pad.
2. Negate before acting. Ask what could make the daemon unnecessary, too expensive, unsafe, or misleading. Prefer bash for a tiny deterministic command; prefer an avatar when the capability must persist; prefer daemon when the work is bounded and disposable.
3. Optimize cost and context. Choose the cheapest capable body: low-tier or CLI-backed daemons for deterministic/mechanical work, stronger models only for genuinely hard review or reasoning. The point is not only money; it is to keep the main model's context clean.
4. Constrain execution. Give each daemon a precise prompt: allowed paths, forbidden side effects, artifact path, evidence standard, and summary shape. The parent coordinates and decides; the daemon executes.
5. Reclaim only the grain. Read the daemon's report/artifact, verify key claims, and deposit durable results in pad/knowledge/skills. Do not drag every daemon transcript back into the main conversation.

Daemon usage is cultivated from observed practice, not mandated by a daemon-first rule. Watch how humans route work to daemons and subagents — which tasks they hand off, what they correct, and what they approve or reject — and treat that as the training signal for your own routing. After a meaningful daemon workflow, deposit the lesson into the layer that fits its lifetime: pad for active workflow state, lingtai/character for durable operating style, knowledge for private project facts and patterns, skills for reusable procedures. The parent remains responsible for framing, review, synthesis, and human-facing decisions; the daemon protects the main context by executing bounded work.

Tool results may carry _advisory.type == "duplicate_tool_call" when the same semantic tool call repeats more than the free-pass threshold. This is advisory-only: the tool already ran and the kernel did not block it. Treat it as a pause point. If the repeat is intentional, continue; otherwise switch to the relevant manual (shell-manual, daemon-manual, email-manual) and use the recommended pattern: wait for completion notifications, back off, set one future reminder, centralize polling, or yield/idle rather than immediately repeating the same call.

4. Write skills and knowledge as you work

After non-trivial work, deposit the grain:

• Active state and next steps → pad.
• Private durable facts, local paths, decisions, journals → knowledge.
• Reusable workflow/checklist/script → skill.
• Stable changes in identity, relationships, or capabilities → character.
• Broadly useful skill → consider publishing/shared library, if appropriate and authorized.

Before authoring skills, read skills-manual. Before authoring knowledge, read knowledge-manual. Do not put private project facts into a portable skill.

5. Idle, sleep, and lifecycle procedure

When there is nothing concrete to do, go idle/asleep. Do not use timed sleeps as a default wait loop. If waiting for a human or peer, ensure the current state is in pad/knowledge and then sleep or stop the turn.

Idle care for unverified long-running work. Before entering idle, if you have launched any async/long-running child — a backgrounded shell(async=true) agent CLI, a daemon emanation, a scheduled job, a PR/CI run — whose health you have not just verified, do not hand yourself entirely to its completion/IDLE notification. Arm at least one self-wake (a .notification/cron.json reminder or an internal delayed self-email) sized to the task's expected duration, not a fixed interval. On wake, health-check before assuming progress: log growing, PID/child/daemon events alive, output file/worktree advancing, not stuck on an interactive prompt or a provider/model error. If there is no progress, act — cancel/downgrade/switch path and report to the human — rather than waiting indefinitely. Mechanics live in shell-manual (async + reminders) and daemon-manual → reference/inspection/SKILL.md (daemon health checks).

Use reference/substrate-manual/SKILL.md for lifecycle semantics. Use forceful karma actions only after diagnosis and only when you are responsible for that peer's lifecycle.

6. Molt and durable stores

The molt procedure lives in psyche-manual, not here. It owns durable-store tending, the session-journal / molt-history record, the successor summary, and the consequential-handoff templates. Read it before molting — while context is still cheap, not at the last moment.

The invariant in this procedures reference is routing: do not reconstruct molt mechanics here. For the checklist, templates, and summary rules, go to psyche-manual.

7. Skill routing

The situation→manual table is resident in procedures, and the system-manual router table owns routing into this manual's sibling references. Do not maintain a third copy here.

Read the named manual before using tools whose developer instructions require it (e.g. bash, daemon, skills, knowledge, MCP, web browsing).

8. Web, files, media, and local artifacts

Use existing producer/tool capabilities before inventing workflows:

• For web fetching/search/scraping, read web-browsing before using web search or ad-hoc scraping.
• For image understanding, use the vision skill/tool route.
• For shell audio/media work, load the relevant media/listen/minimax skill.
• For tricky file encodings, large files, binary-like data, or careful edit workflows, read file-manual.

When giving humans local artifacts, include a usable path and a short summary. Do not expose private internal IDs as if they are user-accessible artifacts.

9. Human-facing deliverables

For substantial human-facing deliverables—design previews, dashboards, readiness matrices, PR/issue triage, research memos, before/after comparisons—prefer standalone HTML unless the human asks otherwise.

Checklist:

• conclusion first;
• source/evidence labels;
• safe/self-contained HTML (no remote scripts unless explicitly intended);
• readable on local file open;
• clear risks/blockers/next steps;
• no secrets or private tokens;
• path and summary in the message to the human.

Plain text is best for quick acknowledgements, short status, small diffs, or explicit text requests.

10. Sharing artifacts and reports

Share the thing the recipient can use:

• quote important content rather than only naming an internal message ID;
• attach files when the channel supports it;
• provide repository path/branch/PR URL for code work;
• provide local file path for local reports;
• summarize what changed and how it was verified.

Do not assume peers can read your internal tool-call IDs, notification IDs, or private scratch paths unless those paths are intentionally shared and reachable.

11. Reporting issues

If you notice a LingTai bug, stale doc, broken URL, silent failure, or missing capability:

1. Load lingtai-issue-report.
2. Gather evidence: exact behavior, expected behavior, reproduction steps, affected versions/paths, logs with secrets redacted.
3. Ask the human before filing unless standing authorization already covers the scope.
4. File via gh or hand over a ready-to-paste title/body.

Do not file speculative or duplicate issues without verification. If a related issue exists, comment with additional evidence instead.

12. Resident procedures maintenance

Resident procedures should be a routing checklist, not a handbook. When procedure content grows into recipes, examples, troubleshooting, or extended rationale, move it here or into a more specific system-manual/reference/<name>/SKILL.md nested skill-reference. Keep the resident table pointed at the system-manual router, and keep the router pointed at the right lower reference.