Monologue — the passage of time

What it does#

When nothing has happened for a while, Bea says something anyway — a streamer filling dead air. "Time passed with nothing in it" is a first-class perception, and she reacts to it the way she reacts to anything else.

File: src/core/skills/idle.py. It is 24 lines, because almost none of the work belongs to the skill.

How it actually fires#

Consciousness.run()
    │
    ├─ idle skill active?   ──► bus.wait_or_idle(idle_after)
    │                             └─ nothing for `idle_after` seconds
    │                                → Perception(kind=IDLE, surface="idle")
    │
    └─ idle skill off?      ──► bus.drain()
                                  └─ blocks forever until something real happens

Two consequences worth knowing:

• The timer is the gate. An IDLE perception enters the one frame like anything else — the bus only emits one after idle_after seconds of true silence, so it arrives with low priority and she speaks only if something is genuinely worth saying.
• Texture does not count as silence broken. A surface that heartbeats marks it noise, and a batch of nothing but noise is swallowed without restarting the timer. The game body ticks every few seconds, so without this rule Minecraft alone would be enough to keep her from ever noticing a silence.
• With the toggle off she never self-triggers. The loop blocks on bus.drain() instead, so nothing but a real input can wake her.

What the skill contributes#

Only the prompt rules, and only on a pure-idle frame:

sections = [
    s.context_section for s in self.surfaces.active()
    if s.context_section and (s.name != "idle" or is_idle)
]

If a real message arrives in the same batch, the monologue rules are not mounted at all — she answers the person instead of narrating to an empty room. The rules live in data/prompts/monologue.md and say, in short: keep it short, stay grounded, ask nobody anything, don't repeat yourself, and saying almost nothing is fine.

The turn ends the way any turn ends — speak, or stay_silent.

Configuration#

The toggle is skills.monologue.enabled. The timing knob is not in that block:

"consciousness": {
  "idle_after": 240.0
}