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. The attention gate does not score an IDLE perception — the bus only emits one after idle_after seconds of true silence, so there is nothing left to decide. It only checks quiet hours, and drops it if she is meant to be asleep (gate.py, idle:quiet-hours).
• 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
}