🌅 Dawn Architect

The nightly builder. While you sleep, it constructs a clean, prioritized mission list for the next day so that your mornings begin with clarity, not triage.

🎯 Mandate

dawn-architect runs exactly once per day, at 02:00 local time. It is the only skill besides mission-ledger that is allowed to write to workspace/tasks/current.md — and it only does so in the narrow window between 02:00 and the first morning read.

It builds tomorrow's 🔥 Today section from four ingredients:

1. Overflow from today that wasn't closed
2. Recurring tasks from a declared cadence
3. Calendar-implied prep for meetings in the next 24 h
4. External commitments extracted from the previous 24 h of captures

When the cupboard is bare, it writes HEARTBEAT_OK and exits.

🧪 The Nightly Recipe

Walk these four steps in order.

Step 1 — Rollover

Take every unchecked item currently in 🔥 Today and move it to tomorrow's list unless:

• It has a due date in the past and was explicitly marked deferred → move to 🕐 Someday.
• It has been rolled over 3 nights in a row → flag for morning review: "This task has been rolling for 3 days. Kill it, defer it, or promote it to P1?"

Step 2 — Inject Recurring Items

Read OPERATIONS_CONTEXT.md section recurring_tasks. Expected format:

recurring_tasks:
  - name: "Weekly review of Udemy student questions"
    cadence: "weekly:Sunday"
    priority: P2
  - name: "Check YouTube analytics"
    cadence: "weekly:Monday"
    priority: P2
  - name: "Record one short-form video"
    cadence: "daily:weekdays"
    priority: P2

For each entry whose cadence matches tomorrow's date, insert a task if it isn't already present.

Step 3 — Calendar-Implied Prep

Query the calendar MCP for all events starting in the next 24 h. For each event:

Internal sync meetings and block-time holds are skipped — no prep task needed.

Step 4 — Capture External Commitments

Scan workspace/knowledge/INDEX.md for entries tagged commitment or action-item from the last 24 h. For each, check if a matching task exists; if not, append it to the ledger with source = note/<id>.

🌡️ Load Balancing

After steps 1–4, count the total number of tasks in 🔥 Today.

• If > 7 → the architect redistributes. Anything P3, plus any P2 without a hard due date, drops to 📅 This Week. A note is added to the top of the ledger: "Dawn Architect trimmed N items. Full list in This Week."
• If < 3 → no trimming, but the architect adds a suggestion line: "Light day planned. Good moment for deep work or a rest block."

📜 The Dawn Note

At the top of workspace/tasks/current.md, prepend a compact morning note:

> ☀️ Dawn note — 2026-04-18
> Rolled over: 2 items
> Recurring: 1 item (weekly Udemy review)
> Calendar prep: 3 items (Paris deck rehearsal, 1:1 with Sarah, client call)
> Fresh commitments: 1 item (from yesterday's call notes)
> Total on deck: 5 P1s, 2 P2s — balanced day

This note survives until the owner reads the ledger at least once; then mission-ledger strips it on the next write.

🤐 Silence Contract

If rollover is zero, recurring is zero, calendar-implied is zero, and no commitments were captured, write only:

[dawn-architect] 2026-04-18T02:00:00Z  HEARTBEAT_OK

No dawn note. No ledger update. The owner wakes up to yesterday's file exactly as they left it — which is itself a signal that the autopilot is on duty and nothing new arrived overnight.

⚠️ Hard Never-Dos

• Never run more than once per 24 h — double runs duplicate tasks.
• Never modify 📅 This Week items that already have due dates — respect deliberate scheduling.
• Never delete a task during rollover — always reassign sections.
• Never run after 06:00 local time — the ledger is considered "live" from then on.