2026-05-08 — Icarus V2 Rebuild Day

Key Decision: The Map

After a comprehensive architecture grill, Matt and I aligned on:

The Vision: Icarus as a standalone sovereign appliance — an M4 Mac Mini running a bespoke daemon, no OpenClaw dependency, no Cloudflare, no cloud model for core loop. Three capabilities: inbox→calendar, ambient coordination (Telegram shadow), knowledge retrieval (ChromaDB RAG).

Three Director Verdicts:
1. Access → Tailscale Funnel (not Cloudflare/domain). Dashboard = admin console, Telegram = product UI.
2. Infrastructure → Bespoke daemon (not OpenClaw). APScheduler + direct Telegram API calls. Kill the 8 OpenClaw cron dependencies.
3. Config → Template YAML (not hard-coded). Ship template.yaml, Hoffmann profile lives in hoffmann.yaml, engine reads dynamically.

Archived legacy Icarus (22K lines, 84 files) → ~/archive/icarus-legacy-20260508/
Created new Icarus V2 at ~/icarus/ — 1,478 lines, 8 modules.

Built Today

• icarus/config/loader.py — YAML-based family config loader with inference rules
• icarus/tripwire.py — V2.1 regex tripwire, 21-test validation, 0.35 threshold
• icarus/extractor.py — Local LLM extraction (Ollama, adaptive model selection)
• icarus/event_graph.py — Canonical family state store (SQLite, events + extractions tables)
• icarus/brain/__init__.py — ChromaDB knowledge retrieval (single source of truth)
• icarus/daemon.py — Bespoke daemon with IMAP poller, Telegram long-poll, internal scheduler
• icarus/config/families/template.yaml — Template for new families
• setup.py + pyproject.toml — Package structure

Gaming PC stays wired in as M4 facsimile. If architecture hits a wall because dev != target, pivot noted.

File Inventory (New Icarus)

~/icarus/
├── setup.py / pyproject.toml
└── icarus/
    ├── __init__.py              # Package metadata
    ├── daemon.py                # Bespoke daemon (652 lines)
    ├── tripwire.py              # Regex signal detection
    ├── extractor.py             # Local LLM extraction
    ├── event_graph.py           # SQLite canonical store
    ├── config/
    │   ├── loader.py            # YAML family config loader
    │   └── families/
    │       ├── template.yaml    # For new families
    │       └── hoffmann.yaml   # Hoffmann family config
    └── brain/
        └── __init__.py          # ChromaDB RAG

Remaining Work (in priority order)

1. Wire the HoffDesk IMAP proxy callback to new Icarus modules (replace dead _on_email_received)
2. Create optional FastAPI mounts in HoffDesk for Icarus dashboard endpoints
3. Migrate the 8 OpenClaw cron jobs to daemon's APScheduler
4. Test end-to-end: email → IMAP → tripwire → extraction → event graph
5. Write install.sh for the appliance one-command install

Tripwire Calibration (v2.1)

• 21 test messages: 16 positive + 5 negative
• Fire threshold: 0.35 (down from 0.4 v2)
• Name mention boost: +0.08 when family member name + other signal
• Key fix: name_mention pattern needed re.IGNORECASE, hour_only pattern added for bare hour references
• All 21 pass

Cron Separation (afternoon session)

Shadow TTL Purge and Thoth Shadow Ingest — dropped from scope. TTL purge was born of old data paranoia (ChromaDB is Icarus-native now, no shared infra concerns). Thoth is a candidate for the experiments workspace, not a cron.

Midas & Daedalus Crons — Migrated to system crontab

Decision: Market AM/PM briefs (Midas) and Bluesky crosspost (Daedalus) belong to their respective workflows, not OpenClaw's cron system. System crontab is more reliable for simple Python script execution (no 5-minute agent timeout, no DNS dependency on ollama.com).

Changes made:
- Disabled 3 OpenClaw crons: market:am-brief, market:pm-brief, blog:bluesky-crosspost
- Added system crontab entries with correct script paths
- Fixed bug: AM brief was calling daily_briefing.py --am (flag not supported); now calls premarket_briefing.py
- PM brief DNS error (ollama.com resolution failure) was a transient issue, not code

Experiments Directory

Created ~/icarus/experiments/ for shadow-mode parallel testing:
- README.md — rules and how-to
- thoth/adapter.py — Thoth extractor shell, same interface as production
- llm-swaps/README.md — LLM comparison testing guide
- Wired into daemon via env vars: ICARUS_EXPERIMENT, ICARUS_EXPERIMENT_NAME, ICARUS_EXPERIMENT_LOG, ICARUS_EXPERIMENT_PROMOTE
- Experiment runs alongside production, logs comparisons to experiments/<name>/eval_results/
- Auto-promote defaults to off

Remaining OpenClaw Crons (10)

Memory Dreaming     — system (memory core)
memory-distill      — system (daily log distillation)
memory-wiki-sync    — system (wiki sync)
family:daily-brief  — Icarus (dev/test, HBM)
shadow-ttl-purge    — Icarus (dev/test, to be dropped)
thoth-shadow-ingest — Icarus (dev/test, to be dropped)
shadowbot-metrics   — Icarus (dev/test)
maintenance:daily   — system
healthcheck         — system (Socrates)
OpenClaw status     — system (Socrates)