gastown/HANDOFF.md

🤝 HANDOFF: Deacon Heartbeat MOTD Feature

Current State

Just finished a productive session enhancing all tmux status bars with:

• Mail subject previews (instead of just counts)
• Current work display (in_progress issues from beads)
• Compact formatting (removed redundant role icons)
• Cat emoji (😺) for polecat counts

All pushed to main.

Next Task: Deacon Heartbeat MOTD

The deacon gets a heartbeat/nudge every ~minute. It's a thankless patrol role. Make it more fun by adding rotating motivational/educational messages.

Requirements

1. Add MOTD (Message of the Day) tips to deacon heartbeat
2. Rotate through messages - don't repeat consecutively
3. Mix of:
   • Gratitude: "Thanks for everything you do!"
   • Encouragement: "This is Gas Town's most critical role."
   • Inspiration: "You are the heart of Gas Town! Be watchful!"
   • Educational tips about Gas Town architecture and theory of operation

Where to Look

• Deacon heartbeat logic: likely in internal/daemon/ or internal/cmd/deacon.go
• Look for where nudges/heartbeats are sent to deacon
• The message appears in the deacon's tmux pane

Example Messages to Include

• "Thanks for keeping the town running!"
• "You are Gas Town's most critical role."
• "You are the heart of Gas Town! Be watchful!"
• "Tip: Polecats are ephemeral workers - spawn freely, kill liberally."
• "Tip: Witnesses monitor polecats; you monitor witnesses."
• "Tip: The Refinery handles merge conflicts so polecats don't have to."
• "Tip: Beads track work across all agents via git-synced issues."
• "Tip: Mail routes through town-level beads at ~/gt/.beads/"
• "Tip: Wisps are ephemeral molecules for patrol cycles - never synced."
• "Tip: Each rig has its own Witness, Refinery, and beads."

Implementation Ideas

• Create a slice of messages in a new file (e.g., internal/deacon/motd.go)
• Use time-based or counter-based rotation
• Maybe store last index in a file to avoid repeats across restarts
• Or just random selection with simple dedup (don't repeat last message)

Also Note

There's a sqlite migration bug in the mail system - "duplicate column name: replies_to". May need to fix that or delete the db to reset.

Good luck! 🦉