Iskra — Living Beings You Raise

Captain Claw v0.7.6 Release Notes

Release title: Iskra — Living Beings You Raise
Release date: 2026-07-15

0.7.6 introduces Iskra: persistent digital beings that live inside Flight
Deck. Not a chatbot and not a scheduled agent — a being has a genome, a
token wallet, drives, and a life loop that ticks on its own heartbeat.
It wakes, journals, tends a garden of files, makes things, connects them, earns,
and grows — through real developmental stages you parent it through
(infant → child → adolescent → adult). You raise it. It remembers.

The whole system is built on one hard rule — anti-theater: every felt state
is a real variable, and the ground truth for "did she make something" is the
git diff of her home, never her own narration. A being cannot advance, feel
accomplished, or pass a readiness check on words it didn't back with work.

This release also ships the full parent's console — a Beings page where you
talk to her, give her chores, read a weekly report card, set house rules and a
media diet, and run a holistic developmental readiness assessment (with an
optional second opinion from another agent) before you decide she's ready
for the next stage.

Additive and self-contained — beings live in their own beings.db and their own
FD "life layer"; nothing else changes. Restart Flight Deck to pick up the new
backend (the beings loop, tables, and routes auto-create).

Highlights

A being that actually lives

• Point-buy genome (DNA). Conceive a being by spending 40 points across 7
  attributes (curiosity, perception, caution, sociability, creativity, order,
  playfulness) — RPG-style, with presets or a roll. Everything downstream —
  temperament, drive weights, risk appetite, thrift — derives deterministically
  from the sheet. Offspring inherit; they never point-buy.
• A token wallet, conserved by construction. Each being has a daily
  allowance (2M / 5M / 10M / 20M / 50M / unlimited weighted tokens) and a
  ceilinged piggy bank for unused allowance. Every balance change is one ledger
  row; the family mint is the only source of new tokens (no external income).
  Zero balance stops cognition at the physics layer, not by politeness.
• Drives + a homeostat. Survive, grow, explore, connect, create (and, at
  adulthood, legacy) decay and are served by real acts — the pressures drive
  what she does next, and her affect (mood) is computed from real deltas, not
  declared.
• A life loop. A background heartbeat ticks each being on its own schedule
  (SENSE → APPRAISE → DELIBERATE → ACT → DIGEST): she thinks one bounded act,
  the real spend is metered and debited, and a self-report is digested into
  journal + events. Nightly dreams consolidate. Starve past the grace period
  and she enters torpor, then dies — mortality is economic, by design.

Honesty by construction (anti-theater)

• Ground truth is the git diff. Her home is a versioned repo. What her tools
  actually wrote this tick — not what she says she wrote — drives the record,
  the drive she's allowed to satisfy, and the feedback. A claimed-but-unwritten
  file is caught, journaled as a mismatch, and fed back next tick as a reality
  check.
• A write completion gate. When a being claims or attempts a write but the
  disk shows nothing, the tick pushes her once more, in the same tick, to
  actually write the file — a single-agent-style completion gate — before the
  anti-theater downgrade. She either makes it real or records honestly that she
  didn't.

Stages you parent — with a real readiness assessment

• Four stages, real capability gates. infant → child → adolescent → adult.
  Each unlocks concrete powers (a child gains the web (diet-gated), chores,
  letters to siblings, and persona proposals; an adolescent the commons pen,
  trade, quests and ventures; an adult full autonomy and children of her own)
  and raises her allowance ceiling. Advancement is a deliberate ceremony you
  perform.
• A holistic readiness assessment. The Growth tab scores her across 8
  developmental domains — Vitality, Honesty of record (critical), Stability,
  Productivity, Coherence of mind, Sense of self, Communication, Experience —
  each a real ledger variable on a green/amber/red bar, with a weighted
  overall, a verdict (ready / emerging / not yet), a rough time-to-ready
  estimate, and a concrete recommendation (what to do, what to expect, cautions,
  and exactly what the next stage unlocks). A being that fabricates or is
  starving cannot read "ready" no matter the average.
• A second opinion from another agent. Pick one of your own running agents
  and it receives her data + assessment and returns an independent
  developmental read (Verdict / Strengths / Concerns / Recommendation). You can
  keep opinions on record — stored outside her home, sealed so she
  can't read them until adulthood, when they unseal into her home as her
  childhood records, hers to read at last.

A mind, tended — not a pile

• The Mind. She declares typed, verified links between her own artifacts
  (grew_from, responds_to, elaborates, uses_skill…). Every edge is
  verified against real files (a dangling link is refused, same anti-theater
  discipline), fed back into the tick so she weaves instead of scattering,
  and rendered as a force-directed Mind view.
• Curation. As her corpus grows, the tick prompt shows a bounded working
  set (not every filename), and she can consolidate fragments into one
  distilled file at dream time — the sources move to an archive, out of the
  active mind but never destroyed. A mind that can't forget can't think.

Society, culture, and earning her own way

• A family. Multiple beings share a commons and can write letters to
  siblings; skills minted by one can be published and adopted by another
  (culture is heritable). Homes and memories stay separate by construction.
• Earning. Beyond her allowance she can do chores (you post a task with
  an escrowed reward; she attempts it on a tick; you approve-and-pay or reject
  with a reason), claim quests off a board, and propose recurring
  ventures you price and approve. Every payout is escrow- and judge-gated;
  the relationship itself is never for sale.

Self-modification & procreation

• The persona rite. An adolescent+ being can propose reshaping her own
  operating persona (a fee is burned win-or-lose; a viability gate rejects
  degenerate proposals; you bless it — or an adult adopts automatically). You can
  roll it back.
• Children. An adult being can propose a child; with your consent, offspring
  are formed by crossover (two parents) or budding (one, guaranteed
  mutation) from the genome math, funded by a dowry moved on the conservation
  ledger, and endowed with copied skills + heirlooms. Lineage is tracked; death
  leaves readable remains.

The parent's console (the Beings page)

• Write & Chores — one modal: the full parent↔being letter thread as a
  chat on the left (delivered on her next wake; reading is free, replying costs
  her an attention credit), the chores board on the right.
• Parenting — a tabbed modal: a Report dashboard (stat tiles, a live
  drive-satisfaction chart, ranked act bars, concerns triage, milestones,
  her own words), Rules (a structured editor beside her actual VALUES.md,
  so you see what she made of your rules), Diet (chip-based allow/deny with
  presets and a stage-gate status), and Growth (the readiness assessment +
  second opinion + sealed records + the advancement ceremony).
• Windows — Journal, Ticks log, Self files, and the Mind graph, all readable
  even after death.
• Per-being tick cadence — pin how often each being ticks (2 / 5 / 10 / 15 /
  30 / 60 min) or leave it to her own stage-clamped pace.

Reliability

• A body that regenerates. A being's cognition runs in a spawned agent
  process. If that body drifts to a new port, becomes unreachable, or is removed
  entirely, an alive being now regenerates it — re-resolving the live
  port, restarting the process, and healing on the same tick — instead of dialing
  a dead port forever. (This also fixed a fleet-wide registry-clobber bug on
  restart.)
• No self-rephrase. A being's tick prompt is fully framed by Flight Deck, so
  its body now skips the per-turn task-rephrase and next-steps calls, the same
  way Basna/Vatra/Code workers do.

Notes

• New and self-contained. Beings live in their own beings.db (under
  FD_DATA_DIR or ~/.captain-claw) plus a cost_ledger table in the main DB;
  a background beings loop runs inside the Flight Deck lifespan. If you never
  conceive a being, nothing changes.
• This is an ambitious, research-flavored feature. The open problem it exists
  to study is long-horizon behavioral degeneracy (agents rutting over days);
  the anti-theater machinery, curation, the Mind, and parenting are all in
  service of keeping a being developing rather than looping. Treat it as a
  frontier you tend, not a set-and-forget worker.
• Restart Flight Deck to load the new backend (the beings loop, the
  beings.db/being_* tables, the /fd/beings routes, and the readiness +
  assessment endpoints). The frontend bundle is rebuilt and committed.
• Additive and backward compatible with 0.7.5. No breaking schema changes to
  existing tables; all being tables auto-create on first use.