dreaming

name	dreaming
description	Offline reflection on the project's recent chat sessions. Use when the user asks "what did I learn last week?", "summarize my recent sessions", "what strategies emerged?", or wants to see/manage the strategy memory under .agent/wiki/. Provides background on the dreaming pipeline (HARVEST/SEGMENT/REFLECT/DISTILL/GROUND/CONSOLIDATE/PROMOTE/INDEX) that runs nightly to maintain strategy SKILL.md cards under .claude/skills/strategies/<domain>/<id>/, and a feedback artifact at dreaming/dream-<date>.dreams.json. Reads .agent/wiki/ for prior strategies, never invents one without trajectory support, and asks the user before acting on a contested strategy.
allowed-tools	Read Grep Glob
license	MIT
metadata	{"version":"1.0.0","author":"etienne"}

Dreaming — offline strategy memory for the agent

The dreaming pipeline is the agent's offline self-improvement loop. It runs nightly (configurable) over the project's .etienne/chat.history-*.jsonl session files and produces two outputs:

1. Strategy SKILL.md cards under .claude/skills/strategies/<domain>/<id>/SKILL.md. Each card is a Voyager-style "skill indexed by description": its YAML frontmatter description is what the inference agent uses to autonomously select the strategy when relevant. The body holds Provenance / WHEN / DO / BECAUSE / EVIDENCE / WEB SOURCES.
2. A human-feedback artifact at dreaming/dream-<YYYY-MM-DD>.dreams.json listing the top N items by composite score, with dismissedByUser: false. The user reviews each item with thumbs-up / thumbs-down / "deepen" verdicts. Verdicts are appended to .agent/wiki/dreaming-feedback/<date>.md and consumed by the next HARVEST.

When to invoke this skill

Read this skill when the user asks about the dreaming process itself, or wants to inspect/curate the strategy store. Do not invoke dreaming-stage logic from chat — that is backend code that runs on a cron trigger. Your role here is to:

• Explain the pipeline if asked.
• Read dreaming/dream-*.dreams.json and summarize the latest items if requested.
• Read .claude/skills/strategies/<domain>/<id>/SKILL.md to surface a specific strategy.
• Read .agent/wiki/dreaming-feedback/*.md to remind the user what they previously rejected or asked to investigate.

Pipeline overview (read-only — do not run)

HARVEST → SEGMENT → REFLECT → DISTILL → GROUND → CONSOLIDATE → PROMOTE → INDEX

• HARVEST finds session JSONL files newer than last_run_ts and groups by domain (heuristic: contextName on the first user turn).
• SEGMENT windows each session into trajectories (12 turns, step 6) and tags coarse outcome signals (tool errors, retries).
• REFLECT asks an LLM to extract WHEN/DO/BECAUSE candidate strategies per trajectory. Output is Zod-validated; up to two retries on schema failure.
• DISTILL clusters near-duplicate candidates within the run via embedding cosine ≥ 0.85.
• GROUND asks the LLM to classify 3–8 plausible authoritative web sources as supports/contradicts/neutral.
• CONSOLIDATE searches the existing strategy collection (cosine > 0.88) and runs a MERGE LLM pass when an overlap is found. Direct contradictions are marked status: contested.
• PROMOTE filters by three gates (G1 confidence/support → G2 web evidence or cross-trajectory support → G3 composite score ≥ 0.78). G1/G2 rejects buffer for the next run.
• INDEX writes SKILL.md atomically, embeds the description into ChromaDB collection strategy_descriptions_<project>_<dim>, and appends to the per-domain log.md.

Storage layout

<project>/
├── .claude/skills/strategies/<domain>/<id>/SKILL.md   ← strategy cards (Voyager pattern)
├── .claude/skills/strategies/<domain>/log.md          ← append-only promotion log
├── .agent/wiki/                                       ← strategy memory (mission/index/...)
├── .agent/wiki/dreaming-feedback/<date>.md            ← user verdicts for next REFLECT
├── .etienne/dreaming.settings.json                    ← user-facing config
├── .etienne/dreaming/queue.db                         ← SQLite-MQ for the pipeline
├── .etienne/chat.history-<sessionId>.jsonl            ← raw session (HARVEST input)
└── dreaming/dream-<date>.dreams.json                  ← feedback artifact

Configuration surfaces

User configures via Settings → Dreaming tile in the Etienne frontend:

• Daily start time (cron expression; default 0 22 * * *)
• Maximum LLM calls per run or maximum daily budget
• Maximum items to surface per dream artifact (default 10)

A soft pre-flight budget check reads .etienne/costs.json and refuses to enqueue if today's spend already exceeds the configured maximum. Mid-run hard enforcement is out of scope for v1.

Reading the dream artifact

A dreams.json file looks like:

{
  "runId": "run-2026-05-09-abcd1234",
  "generatedAt": "2026-05-09T22:01:13.512Z",
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "pg-migration-large-oltp",
      "domain": "postgres",
      "title": "Schema-First + Parallel COPY for Large OLTP Migrations",
      "body": "<full SKILL.md body>",
      "evidence": ["sess_2026-05-02 turns 14-26", "..."],
      "compositeScore": 0.83,
      "status": "active",
      "dismissedByUser": false
    }
  ]
}

When the user reviews, each item gets one of: good (sets status active), bad (sets status deprecated), deepen (sets status investigating). The frontend submits the verdicts atomically; once all items are dismissed, the cloud-moon quick action above the chat input disappears.

Anti-patterns

• Do not invent a strategy that has no support in any session trajectory. The pipeline enforces this in REFLECT, but a chat-side suggestion bypasses the gate.
• Do not rewrite an existing strategy SKILL.md without going through CONSOLIDATE. Manual edits are permitted, but the next dream run may merge them in unexpected ways.
• Do not treat wiki/ (factual memory, maintained by the wiki skill) and .agent/wiki/ (strategy memory, maintained by dreaming) as the same store. They have different lifecycles and different invariants.