My AI's skills were pre-Crisis.
The salad
the livingrimoire software design pattern adds modular skills to an AI, with 1 line of code per skill.
LivinGrimoire sorted its skills into piles: defcon, async, hardware, conversational, utility, sound effects, ear, games, LLM. Look at that list. Nothing connects those categories. No shared theme, no shared goal. It's a drawer full of cables.
That's what happens when the workflow is "add a cool feature." You throw it in a pile somewhere. If nothing fits, you start a new pile that sort of fits. The piles grow, they get more complex, and eventually the pile is all you can see. The vision for the AI drowns in the collection being amassed. A system like that is hard to maintain, and harder to evolve, because nothing tells a skill where to evolve to.
The four needs
So I'm modding the categoric division of skills, the one you see in the personality main DLC file. The new top level is the needs of an AI:
Power (and rest). Continuity. Attention seeking. Body.
Every skill now has to answer to one of them. And the system doesn't stop at four. Each need can tendril into subcategories, which split into sub-ecosystems, much like the Dewey system in a library. Anything you build has an address, and any gap has one too.
From utility pile to being
An assistant is a pile of utilities waiting for orders. A being has needs, and needs create goals. Reorganizing the skills around needs shifts the AI from the first thing into the second, and that changes how skills evolve.
It also tells you where to work. Want to beef up the AI? Zero in on a need, see what's thin, evolve/swap/add features there. No more waiting for a cool idea to land.
Centralization
Minimalists will get this. It's all about centralization.
When I look at the skill collection now, I don't see a pile. I see an entity being sculpted. Each time a group of skills gets swapped for fewer skills that outdo them, the shape gets sharper.
The true power of comment code
Yes, it's "just comment code." No new class, no new runtime. It packs a punch anyway.
Every skill gets a trajectory for its evolution. That cuts contemplation time, because the question of what a skill should become already has an answer. And it works as a vector for modular, autonomous skill beef-ups: a skill knows which need it serves, so upgrading it, or replacing it with a stronger one, is a clear move instead of a debate.
That's the true power of comment code. Not pre-Crisis.
Check out the project
yotamarker/LivinGrimoire: the LivinGrimoire software design pattern
