tidepool

Imported from FlaccidNoise/life-sim (tidepool/AGENTS.md). Install upstream with npx skills add FlaccidNoise/life-sim --skill tidepool. Copyright stays with the author.

Tidepool — Agent Instructions

Tidepool is a ground-up rebuild of the life simulation in the repo root, as a game. You play one creature among creatures that each run an evolved neural network. It shares no code with the draft in /src. Do not import from the draft and do not edit it from here.

Read first

1. docs/design.md: what the game is. Locked with the owner.
2. docs/architecture.md: stack, budgets, layout, rules.
3. docs/roadmap.md: milestones and their exit checks.
4. docs/plans/: the task-level plan for the current milestone.
5. docs/decisions/INDEX.md: decisions already made. Do not reopen one without new evidence.

Status

M0 (foundation) and M1 (first swim) are built, audited, and pushed. M2 (Bodies) is built from docs/plans/2026-10-11-m2-bodies.md and pushed. make check, make gates, and make gates-long all exit 0. The first audit (docs/findings/m2-audit.md) found that evolution removed the senses by tick 144,000. The cause was the upkeep of a part, and the owner deleted that rule on 2026-10-12 (docs/findings/m2-senses.md). The second audit, at the head, is docs/findings/m2-audit-2.md: no High finding, and what it found and what was fixed is at the end of that file. The exit record is docs/findings/m2-exit.md. Of the owner's five checks, one is done, one is half done, and three are open.

M3 (Minds) has a plan, docs/plans/2026-10-13-m3-minds.md. The owner approved it on 2026-10-13. It is built, audited (docs/findings/m3-audit.md), and its exit record is docs/findings/m3-exit.md. The owner's checks are open. The walkthrough (docs/plans/2026-10-13-walkthrough.md) is built. The owner approved the M4 plan on 2026-10-15 (docs/plans/2026-10-14-m4-teeth.md), at the recommended option of every choice and C9 at B. M4 is built with every rule on by the owner's instruction of 2026-10-16, measured, and audited twice (docs/findings/m4-audit-1.md, m4-audit-2.md); its exit record is docs/findings/m4-exit.md. The roadmap's coexistence is not met and is the owner's finding; the owner's checks are open. The plan says which owner stops the build runs through and which stops are hard ("How the build runs without the owner"). A choice logged as "provisional, owner to confirm" in docs/decisions/INDEX.md is not final.

Commands

Run from tidepool/. If cargo is not found, run . "$HOME/.cargo/env".

Gotchas

• tidepool/ is its own pnpm root. pnpm-workspace.yaml here gives it a separate lockfile and node_modules. Run pnpm from tidepool/, never from the repo root, for Tidepool work.
• TypeScript stays on 6. typescript-eslint 8 requires <6.1.0.
• No standard-library transcendental math in crates/sim. Banned on f32 and f64: trigonometric and hyperbolic functions and their inverses, exponentials, logarithms, powers (powf, powi), hypot, cbrt, and mul_add. They differ between native and WASM and break the determinism test. Use sim::math. sqrt, abs, and rounding are allowed. Clippy rejects the banned calls (clippy.toml). A test file under crates/sim/tests/ runs native only and can start with #![allow(clippy::disallowed_methods)]. A #[cfg(test)] module in crates/sim/src can carry the same allow on the one function that needs it.
• A field that is not in save and load is a bug. The state hash is the CRC of the saved bytes.
• A number that needs tuning goes in params.rs. Rule code has no magic numbers.
• Tune at 12,000 ticks on 3 seeds, one run at a time, against a baseline. Shorter runs were wrong in both directions on the draft. Two long runs at once die silently.
• A gate counts only after it has rejected a known-bad input. Record the proof in docs/gates.md.
• Claim only what was measured. "The mechanism fires", "evolution uses it", and "it helps" are three different claims.
• A feature that fails its measurement is deleted. Keep the note in docs/findings/. No dead flags.
• Browser checks: use a port that is not already in use, since a reused port can serve a stale module. Keep the tab in the foreground, since a hidden tab stops requestAnimationFrame.
• spikes/ is throwaway. Never import from it. Port code out of it by copying.
• Commit at each task. Do not push in the middle of a plan. Pushing at session end follows the root AGENTS.md. The GitHub repo is public.

Building with agents

The session that builds is an orchestrator. It dispatches one task per agent and checks each claim before the commit. The agent for each task is in the plan. Tiers: docs/architecture.md §12.