heartbeat

${var} — selector. Empty (default) = the ambient fleet check — the live path a cron runs once a day; leave it empty for the scheduled run. brief = the priority brief. See the grammar below.

Selector / ${var} grammar

• `` (empty) — Ambient check across all skills / PRs / issues, and regenerate the public status page. This is the live, scheduled path (08:00 UTC daily); its behaviour is unchanged. Leave ${var} empty for the cron.
• <area> (any non-empty value that is not brief, e.g. crypto, prs) — Ambient check, with the checks focused on that area (original heartbeat focus-area behaviour).
• brief — Priority brief: rank the 3 things to focus on today, why now, and what moved since yesterday; send via ./notify + email.
• brief:<area> (e.g. brief:crypto) — Priority brief biased toward <area>.

Shared setup (every run)

Read memory/MEMORY.md and the last 2 days of memory/logs/ for context.

Parse ${var} to pick the branch:

• starts with brief (i.e. brief or brief:<area>) → run the Priority brief branch. Any text after brief: is the emphasis area.
• otherwise (empty, or any other value) → run the Ambient check branch. A non-empty value is the focus area; empty runs all checks.

The two branches are mutually exclusive — run exactly one per invocation.

Ambient check (default — empty ${var}; the LIVE scheduled path)

If ${var} is set to a focus area, focus checks on that specific area.

Checks (in priority order)

P0 — Failed & stuck skills (check first)

Read memory/cron-state.json. If the file is missing or empty (e.g. a fresh fork whose scheduler hasn't written it yet), treat state as empty: report no cron-state yet for the P0 tier, skip the failure/degradation checks below, and still render the status page (every enabled skill shows not yet run). This file tracks every scheduled skill's state and quality metrics:

{
  "skill-name": {
    "last_dispatch": "2026-04-06T12:00:00Z",
    "last_status": "dispatched|success|failed",
    "last_success": "2026-04-06T12:05:00Z",
    "last_failed": "2026-04-05T12:03:00Z",
    "total_runs": 10,
    "total_successes": 8,
    "total_failures": 2,
    "consecutive_failures": 0,
    "success_rate": 0.80,
    "last_quality_score": 4,
    "last_error": "error signature text"
  }
}