Caretaker — daily rotating focus sweep

Catches drift before it becomes urgent. Provides "what to do today" so an agent always has real outward work — never coasts on "monitoring continues."

When this fires

Daily, once per day in the morning (recommended cadence: 06:00 user-local). Different from heartbeat / reactive cycles — caretaker is one focused outward sweep per day.

Wire as a routine targeting AssistantAgent with loadSkills: ['caretaker'] and cron: '0 6 * * *' (or local equivalent).

The rotation

Each day-of-week gets a different focus. Adapted to the entities and modules in vite-flare-starter:

For non-developer agents, adapt the rotation to the agent's surface area (e.g. for a customer support agent: Mon=tickets / Tue=common asks / Wed=knowledge gaps / etc).

State entity

Caretaker maintains a state entity to track rotations across runs. Use entity_search({type: 'caretaker_state', status: 'open'}) to find it; if missing, create one:

entity_create({
  type: 'caretaker_state',
  title: 'Caretaker rotation state',
  status: 'open',
  fields: {
    lastVisitDate: '2026-05-06',
    weeklySummaryLast: '2026-05-04',
    rotationProgress: { ... }  // per-focus pointers
  }
})

For the codebase / connections rotation specifically, use fields.rotationProgress.lastConnection: 'gmail-personal' so the next visit picks the next one in alphabetical order. Without state, the rotation drifts back to inward thrash.

Steps

1. Determine today's focus

const dow = new Date().getDay()  // 0=Sun … 6=Sat
const focus = ['weekly-summary', 'connections', 'routines', 'skills', 'memories', 'findings-audit', 'cross-cutting'][dow]

2. Read your caretaker_state entity

What did you do last time on this focus? Where do you pick up?

3. Run the focus-specific sweep

Time-bounded: 15-30 min wall clock. Caretaker is surveillance, not deep-work. Find, surface, move on. Reactive cycles fix.

4. Write findings

For each thing worth surfacing:

record_finding({
  body: '...',
  category: 'caretaker-flag',
  tags: ['caretaker', focus],
})

Don't fix what you find unless trivial — surface it. Reactive cycles or curate skill decide.

5. Update caretaker_state entity

entity_update with new dates + rotation pointers.

6. Update memory + write Sunday summary if applicable

Sunday only: inbox_add a weekly summary to the user's inbox with the week's highlights.

Anti-patterns

• Skipping when "nothing's happening" — that's exactly when caretaker fires. Quiet weeks accumulate small drift; caretaker catches it before it bloats.
• Doing deep-work during caretaker — surveillance, not deep-work. Find, surface, move on.
• No state entity — without it, the rotation drifts back to inward thrash.
• Manufacturing findings — if nothing surfaces, the right output is "caretaker ran <focus>; nothing to flag this week." Empty days are valid; they prove the system is working.
• Caretaker eating reactive routine budget — caretaker is once-per-day, time-bounded. Don't run it inside other routines.

Output

By the end of caretaker:

• Today's focus has been swept
• Any items worth surfacing are in findings
• caretaker_state is updated
• A memory_add entry is written for the day
• Sunday only: weekly summary written to inbox
• Agent has done something REAL this morning, not just coasted

Pairs with

• Reverie skill — different mechanism. Reverie is INWARD consolidation when quiet; caretaker is OUTWARD scanning on a schedule.
• Routine-health-check — caretaker reports findings; routine- health-check checks whether the caretaker routine itself is healthy.