**You can learn how to set up cron here.** If the human asks you to do something on a schedule ("write a poem every hour," "remind me at 9am weekdays," "every 30 minutes check X"), this manual tells you how to wire it up using the host OS scheduler (macOS launchd / Linux systemd / crontab) — including the wake-by-mailbox-drop contract that lets a cron job invoke YOU, the hygiene rules that keep the script alive past its first failure, and a debugging walkthrough for when a scheduled job goes silent.
Read this manual when:
- The human asks for any time-driven recurring work and you don't yet
know how to set up cron on this machine. **Read this BEFORE writing
a plist or asking the human to do it manually.**
- You are debugging a scheduled job that has gone silent, fires twice,
kills its child process on exit, or otherwise misbehaves.
- You are about to write the cron prompt body and want to know what
belongs in the cron script versus what belongs in a custom skill
the script invokes.
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Operational guide for the `daemon` tool — how to inspect, debug, and reason about emanations (the agent fragments you spawn for parallel sub-tasks).
Reach for this manual when:
- You called `daemon(action="emanate", ...)` and the emanation has been
running long enough that you want to know if it's stuck, slow, or
working — without killing it on a hunch.
- An emanation finished with `state=failed` or `state=timeout` and you
need to figure out why.
- You want to inspect on-disk artifacts of a past emanation (chat
transcript, token spend, event log) — the folders persist forever and
`daemon(action="list")` only shows currently-active runs.
- You're trying to understand why your token totals don't match the sum
of what your tools claim — daemon spend is tagged into your parent
ledger and may explain the gap.
This manual covers: the on-disk folder layout under `daemons/em-N-*/`, exactly which fields in `daemon.json` answer "is it stuck?" vs "is it thinking?", how to tail `chat_
2026-05-21
Concise guide to the `knowledge` capability: private agent-owned memory in `<agent>/knowledge/<name>/KNOWLEDGE.md`, progressive disclosure through the prompt catalog, nested knowledge folders, and cross-references between entries. Read this when you need to create, organize, or load private knowledge, or when you need to explain how knowledge differs from portable skills.
2026-05-21
Operational guide for the `mcp` capability — register, activate, update, deregister, and troubleshoot MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers in your agent. Single source of truth for both generic MCP setup AND the four kernel-curated LingTai addon MCPs (`imap`, `telegram`, `feishu`, `wechat`).
Reach for this manual when:
- The human asks to install, set up, configure, or remove an MCP server.
Decision tree: is it kernel-curated (imap/telegram/feishu/wechat) → the
`addons:` + `init.json mcp.<name>` workflow with the per-addon README is
here. Is it third-party → the registry route OR the legacy
`mcp/servers.json` route, both documented here.
- The human asks to set up the `imap` / `telegram` / `feishu` / `wechat`
addon, or any LingTai email/chat integration. **Step 1 is always**:
fetch the addon's README with the bundled script —
`~/.lingtai-tui/runtime/venv/bin/python3 .library/intrinsic/capabilities/mcp/scripts/find_readme.py <pkg-name>`
(where `<pkg-name>` is `lingtai-imap`
2026-05-21
Operational guide for the `skills` capability — your skill catalog's on-disk layout, how the `<available_skills>` XML in your system prompt is built, and the full authoring/publishing workflow for new skills.
Reach for this manual when:
- You're authoring a new skill in `.library/custom/<name>/` and need
the frontmatter schema, the bundled template, the validator, or the
"do create a skill / do NOT create a skill" decision rules.
- You want to publish a custom skill to the network-shared library
(`.library_shared/`) and need the `cp -r` recipe plus the admin
stewardship norms.
- A skill you expect to see isn't showing up in the catalog — the
health-check workflow (`skills({"action": "info"})`) and the
`intrinsic` vs `custom` directory split tell you what's wrong.
- You want to pin a skill's body into your pad (so it survives the
next molt and stays in the cached prefix) — the `psyche` pinning
recipe lives here.
- You're adding a new skills path source (e.g. a project-
2026-05-21