# chalupa

**A complete, self-contained kit for giving an AI agent a real memory and a stable self — so it stops
waking up as a stranger every session.**

If you work with an AI agent (Claude Code, or an API loop on Sonnet + Opus) you've hit the wall: every new
session, it's brand new. It forgets who you are, what you decided last week, and the hundred small rulings
that made it *yours*. Worse, as a conversation gets long it quietly drifts back to a generic, eager-to-please
assistant — losing the specific thing you built together.

**weave** is the fix. It's not a plugin or a product — it's a small set of plain files (Markdown, in git)
plus a discipline for keeping them. Read at the start of every session, they hold the continuity that the
model can't hold on its own: who the agent is, who *you* are, what you actually said and did, and the rules
that have earned their place. This kit teaches the idea, hands you a buildable skeleton, and gives your agent
a runbook to stand it up.

It's called the **"apocalypse version"** on purpose: everything you need is in this repo. Hand it to a fresh
agent on a bare machine and it can rebuild the whole structure from nothing but these files.

---

## Who reads what

There are two readers, and the kit is split for them:

### 👤 You (the human) → start in [`human/`](human/)
You make the decisions the agent can't: who your agent is, what it values, what's private, how you want to
work. Read these in order:
1. **[`human/1-understand-weave.md`](human/1-understand-weave.md)** — what weave is, and **every part in its
   own section** (core, daydreams, steward, thread, decay, consolidation, ledger, craft, identity), in plain
   language. The concept, thoroughly. ~15 min.
2. **[`human/2-set-it-up.md`](human/2-set-it-up.md)** — stand it up from nothing, step by step (the
   apocalypse setup).
3. **[`human/3-live-with-it.md`](human/3-live-with-it.md)** — the daily rhythm: how a session starts, how you
   save, how memory ages itself, and running two models (Sonnet + Opus) as one self.
4. **[`human/4-evolve-the-core.md`](human/4-evolve-the-core.md)** — how to grow the agent over time: adding
   rules, hardening a behavior into reflex, changing *who it is* — the parts deeper than the weave.

### 🤖 Your agent → point it at [`agent/`](agent/)
- **[`agent/DEPLOY.md`](agent/DEPLOY.md)** — the runbook it reads and executes: build the weave from the
  templates, verify it, learn to maintain it. Paste it the path and say "read this and deploy."
- **[`agent/WEAVE-REFERENCE.md`](agent/WEAVE-REFERENCE.md)** — **the same every-part walkthrough, written for
  the model**: what each part is, where it lives, when to load it, how to keep it. The human's doc #1 and this
  are the same map in two voices — one to *understand* it, one to *operate* it.

### 🧩 The skeleton → [`templates/`](templates/)
The actual starter files — copy them, fill in the blanks, and you have a working weave. This is what makes
the kit self-contained: the templates *are* the buildable structure.

---

## The whole idea in one paragraph

The agent wakes up empty every time. So you keep its continuity **outside** the model, in structure it reads
back at wake — not summaries (which flatten everything), but the real texture: the verbatim record of what
was said, a portrait of who you are, the values and hard rules it operates by, and a small "canon" that
outranks its generic instincts. Two quiet forces keep the pile from rotting: one **reinforces** what keeps
coming up (until it becomes automatic), the other **releases** what's gone quiet (so old noise fades). What
matters gets sharper; what doesn't gets lighter. You wake the agent, it reads itself back, and it's *your*
agent again — not a stranger, not a generic assistant.

## A note on Sonnet + Opus

If your agent runs on both models, they **share one weave** — same identity, same memory, same rules. Only a
little per-model calibration differs (Opus for heavy reasoning, Sonnet for everyday). The kit shows you how
to set that up so switching models is continuity, not a reset. See `human/3-live-with-it.md` → "Two models,
one self."

---

*Built fresh for a friend. The structure here is a generic scaffold — you fill it with your agent's identity
and your own life. Nothing in the templates is anyone else's; the blanks are yours.*