bismuth

Janhavi speaks into her phone, and a thing she trusts puts it in the right place, tells her it did, and can find it again when she asks.

Two jobs, and only two. Nothing she says is lost. She can get it back.

This is v2. v1 was an assistant, a brainstorming partner and a worker; v2 is capture and retrieval, and the brainstorming partner has moved out. That is a deliberate narrowing — every component removed is one that cannot fail.

Run it

./run.sh                  # preflight, then serve
python3 -m v2 status      # queue, tasks, others/, session, trace health
open ~/bismuth-memory/board.html

Needs a Telegram bot token in config.yaml under v2.telegram_bot_token, and ~/bismuth-memory as a git repo. python3 -m v2 check says what is missing.

How it works

  phone (Telegram voice note)
        │  long-poll, spool to disk, THEN advance the offset
        ▼
  ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  MAIN AGENT — one session, one turn, NO TOOLS │
  │  it decides; it never does                    │
  └───┬──────────────┬──────────────┬─────────────┘
      │ reply        │ task list    │ sub-agents (claude -p, stripped)
      ▼              ▼              ▼ all writes
   Telegram       board        ~/bismuth-memory
        └──────── TRACE (append-only, never rotated) ────────┘

The main agent runs with --tools "", so it cannot do the work itself — even a one-line append is delegated to a sub-agent with a self-contained instruction. Sub-agents have four tools, no identity, and three ways to end: done, needs_input, failed. Only the main agent ever talks to her.

The trace is the single source of truth. The task list and the board are projections of it, so they cannot drift.

Where things are

Path	What
prompts/v2/	the behaviour — main agent, sub-agent, and both schemas
v2/	the runtime (see v2/README.md for the module map)
docs/V2_ARCHITECTURE.md	what it is, component by component
docs/V2_REQUIREMENTS.md	every decision, dated, with the reasoning
tools/board.py	the memory tree as one infinite canvas
tools/transcribe.py	faster-whisper, as a subprocess
TESTS.md	the smoke corpus

After the runtime stripping, prompts/v2/main_agent.md and prompts/v2/subagent.md are the only behavioural content in the system. No skills, no protocols, no MCP. If you want to change how Bismuth behaves, that is where you go.

v1

Gone from this branch: the harness, protocols, watchers, the mailbox, modes, skills, the synthetic inbox. git log --diff-filter=D --name-only finds them; they are in this branch's history, and most are also on main.