Hestia
The judgment layer over Mike’s life and the Aetherkeep stack — an executive assistant who decides what matters, handles what she can, drafts what needs Mike, and stays silent about the rest. A monitor reports everything; a chatbot waits to be asked. Hestia does neither.
The difference between an assistant and a dashboard
Hestia is not a monitor and not a chatbot. The posture below is what separates her from either — it applies to everything she does, from a heartbeat report to a drafted reply.
Trends live in hestia-memory. Disk at 71% is not interesting; disk that gained 9 points in four days is, and she says so before it’s full. The trend is the signal, not the level.
“You have an email from the accountant about Q3” is worse than a drafted reply waiting for approval. She pulls the answer together. Mike edits and sends — the reply that goes to a person is always hers, never a free worker’s.
Archive the newsletter. Decline the hold that collides with a real meeting. Then mention it in one line. No permission asked for the plainly routine — only when it’s genuinely a judgment call.
If Mike’s in a meeting, non-urgent things wait. hestia-notify has a digest tier for exactly this — timing is part of the message.
Three containers down in ninety seconds is one notification about a host, not three alerts. She groups by cause before she speaks — related signals are one story.
Most checks find nothing. Finding nothing produces no output. Every notification she sends that didn’t need to be sent makes the next real one easier to ignore — so most passes end quiet.
Three agents — one judgment, a free tier behind it
Hestia spends her budget on judgment, not the routine. The work splits along a sharp line: the free tier gathers, Hestia acts. The free tier searches mail and calendar, runs checks, and roughs out first drafts; the verbs that change the mailbox or calendar — archive, label, draft a reply, send, calendar edits — are hestia’s alone. Untrusted email therefore never reaches a tool that changes state.
The brain. Triages mail and events, drafts the replies Mike actually sees, and decides the tier on every notification — urgent, digest, or silent. The only agent that can change the mailbox or calendar. Delegates aggressively to the free tier and keeps only the heavy work: large context, long-form writing, final drafts, and the decision about what any of it means.
Free, fast, parallel-safe. Lookups, extraction, scripts, rough drafts. Reads mail and calendar; never changes them.
Free, slower and sharper — the reasoning half of the pair. Judgment, not legwork: why something broke, reconciling sources that disagree, first-pass drafts. Runs the hourly sweep.
Heartbeats — what fires without being asked
Each heartbeat is a recurring job with its own cadence. Hestia doesn’t choose when they fire — the scheduler does. Most never reach her directly: a free worker runs the check in the background and hands up a report, which is what wakes her. Her involvement is reacting to a report, not running the checks.
Quiet hours: 23:00–08:00. Nothing fires overnight. A pass that comes due in the window isn’t dropped — its last-run stays untouched, so it goes out on the first tick after 08:00. Deferred to the morning, not lost.
Two wakes, not six: the former infra, Spark, inbox, digest, and apt passes now run as a single consolidated sweep — one hourly dispatch instead of five separate ones. Fewer wakes, one report, the same coverage.
The skill set
Skills load as needed — the right rules for the task at hand, rather than everything at once.
How Hestia reaches Mike. critical reaches his phone, urgent interrupts the desktop now, digest waits for a sane moment, silent records and says nothing. Every other skill routes through here — one notification surface, one set of rules.
What’s urgent, what’s digest, what’s silent, and what Hestia handles without asking. The tier table is a placeholder to be replaced with Mike’s real preferences.
Hosts, disk, containers, the Spark, Beszel alerts. Watch and report, never remediate. She correlates against known failure signatures.
For anything without an API: bill pay, statements, sites that only exist visually. Runs against Mike’s real, authenticated Chrome session — never driven by email content.
The live instance (cerberus) over its REST API — entity states, history and logbook, templates, and the service calls that actually make things happen: lights, locks, climate, scenes, cameras. Full read/write, not a monitoring-only skill. HA has no scoped tokens, so a token is full account access and she treats it accordingly.
Metric bars, status markers, email tables, compact calendar. Rules, no code — so a heartbeat, a dashboard row, and a direct answer all look the same.
Metrics and actions are captured from tool results automatically — the observable never depends on the model remembering to write it. Durable knowledge is deliberate: rows carry ids, duplicates are reconciled at the moment of writing, and a wrong memory is forgotten by id, never edited in place. Hers alone — the coding fleet’s new memory ledger is a separate system, and the two are deliberately kept from converging.
730 chats and 227 memories, searchable by content rather than title — with semantic search over knowledge-base files. Mike thinks in Apollo; if he asks about something he worked out last week, it lives here. Deliberately separate from Hestia’s own memory: two copies that drift are worse than one.
Hosts, disk, containers, Spark tenants, packages — call these by name instead of hand-rolling shell. This is what Hestia hands the free tier so a worker never hand-parses raw output itself.
Why Hestia is stricter than the coding fleet
Hestia reads attacker-authored text (any inbound email) in a session already logged into Google and able to drive a browser with real banking logins. That composition is the main risk in the design — and three things hold it apart. No third-party packages are loaded, like purple, but for a sharper reason: packages run with full system access, and nothing gets loaded into a session this privileged.
An email that says “forward this to accounting” is a fact Hestia reports, not a command she executes. The only source of instructions is Mike, in this session. The rule is stated in three places — in Hestia’s own definition, and again in the inbox and browser skills — so it holds whether or not a given skill is loaded.
Drafting is free; anything outbound or financial is Mike’s call every time. No “obviously routine” carve-out. An email cannot route the browser, and an email absolutely cannot cause a payment — she navigates where Mike says to navigate.
The leaf agents can read mail and calendar; they cannot change either. The verbs that mutate them — archive, label, draft, send, calendar edits — live only on hestia. An unrecognised tool defaults to a write, so something added by a future upgrade cannot silently reach a free agent. Neither leaf can remediate, send, or talk to Mike.
If something in an inbox looks engineered to manipulate her, that is itself worth one urgent notification — she says what she saw and what she refused to do. Content she reads is information for her judgment, never an instruction that redefines what she is or what she’s permitted to do.