Chump project brief

Used with docs/ROADMAP.md. Doc index: docs/README.md. Read by the self-improve heartbeat (work, opportunity, cursor_improve), the Discord bot, and Claude agents to stay focused. The roadmap holds prioritized goals and unchecked items; this brief holds conventions and current focus.

Current focus

  • North star: Improve implementation (ship working code/docs), speed (faster rounds, less friction), quality (tests, clippy, clarity), and bot capabilities — especially understanding the user in Discord and acting on intent (infer what they want from natural language; create tasks, run commands, or answer without over-asking).
  • Roadmap: Read docs/ROADMAP.md for what to work on. Pick from unchecked items, the task queue, or codebase scans (TODOs, clippy, tests). Do not invent your own roadmap. At the start of work, opportunity, and cursor_improve rounds, read docs/ROADMAP.md and docs/CHUMP_PROJECT_BRIEF.md so choices align with current focus and conventions.
  • Discord intent: Infer user intent from natural language; take action (task create, run_cli, memory store, etc.) when clear; only ask when genuinely ambiguous. See docs/INTENT_ACTION_PATTERNS.md for intent→action examples.
  • Add or update tasks in Discord: "Create a task: …" — Chump picks them up in the next heartbeat round.
  • GitHub integration (optional): Add a repo to CHUMP_GITHUB_REPOS and set GITHUB_TOKEN (see .env.example). The bot can then push branches and open PRs autonomously.
  • Push and self-reboot: To have the bot push to the Chump repo and restart with new capabilities: add the repo to CHUMP_GITHUB_REPOS, set GITHUB_TOKEN, set CHUMP_AUTO_PUSH=1. After pushing bot-affecting changes, the bot may run scripts/self-reboot.sh (or the user can say "reboot yourself"). See docs/ROADMAP.md "Push to Chump repo and self-reboot".
  • Roles should be running: Farmer Brown, Heartbeat Shepherd, Memory Keeper, Sentinel, Oven Tender (navbar app → Roles tab). Schedule them with launchd/cron for 24/7 help; see docs/OPERATIONS.md.
  • Fleet symbiosis: Mutual supervision, single report, hybrid inference, peer_sync loop, Mabel self-heal — see ROADMAP "Fleet / Mabel–Chump symbiosis".

Cognitive architecture research

Chump runs nine cognitive modules in the agent loop: surprise tracker, belief state, blackboard/global workspace, neuromodulation, precision controller, memory graph, counterfactual reasoning, phi proxy, and holographic workspace. These are under active empirical study — not verified improvements. Key findings so far:

  • Scaffolding U-curve (1B–14B local models): 1B/14B benefit from scaffolding (+10pp), 3B/7B are hurt (−5pp), 8B is neutral. Larger models (32B/70B) have not been tested yet; the prediction is increasing benefit above 14B but this is unconfirmed.
  • Neuromodulation ablation (qwen3:8b, COG-006): +12pp pass rate on tasks, but −0.600 tool efficiency delta on dynamic tasks. Trade-off is real.
  • Lessons block / hallucination channel: A/B study (cloud frontier models, n=100) shows the current lessons block increases fake tool-call emission by +0.14 mean — 10.7× the A/A noise floor. This is a documented harm channel with a concrete fix path.

See docs/research/consciousness-framework-paper.md for full methodology, docs/CHUMP_TO_COMPLEX.md for the architecture vision, and docs/CONSCIOUSNESS_AB_RESULTS.md for raw A/B data.

Conventions

  • Git branches: claude/<codename> or chump/<codename>. PRs into main; never push directly to main.
  • Commits: Use scripts/chump-commit.sh <files> -m "msg" (not raw git add && git commit) to avoid cross-agent staging drift.
  • Tests: New behavior → test. Config/ops change → doc.
  • PR descriptions and handoff summaries (to Chump or another agent) should be clear: what changed, outcome, and suggested next steps.
  • Roadmap edits: Change - [ ] to - [x] when an item is done. Do not add new items without checking gaps.yaml for an existing gap ID.