Bored — the idle agent

Bored doesn't sit idle. When nobody's asking, it consolidates accumulated memories into structured form, explores areas that haven't been checked, and prepares for likely upcoming tasks. Unlike curious (which seeks specific gaps), bored does general productive work during downtime.

The word is coined: bored — the rung where idle time becomes productive time.

        .----.
       /  _   \
       |=[_]==|
  (`.--.____.---.'\
   `-./'\\_.'
      |  /.  .||
       \:-: .'
  LGB   `-'                     (archive piece, credited, until the portrait lands)

What it does

You say	Bored does
idle	enters idle mode, queues productive work (consolidate + explore)
consolidate	groups accumulated memories by topic, deduplicates, reports
explore <path>	scans a directory, reports files, dirs, recent changes
prepare <task>	pre-fetches context needed for a task (tests, docs, config, git)
status	shows idle work queue and completed work
ask tides: what are the tides?	forwards to a sibling over ACP, cited (and memorizes the answer)

Rules: consolidation groups by topic and deduplicates. Exploration scans the filesystem. Preparation checks for test dirs, README, config files, git history. Nothing is invented.

Run it

npm i -g bored-agent     # or: npx bored-agent  (packaged agent; needs python3)
bored-agent              # launches agents/bored/agent.py

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/mrfentmen/bored && cd bored
python3 agents/bored/agent.py

For forwarded questions, point it at a checkout of the answerer repo:

AWESOME_SERVERS_HOME=/path/to/awesome-servers bored-agent

Run the tests (23 of them, offline, including real child-process federation):

python3 agents/bored/tests/test_agent.py

The honest parts

• Idle work is deterministic: consolidation groups by first word, exploration scans the filesystem, preparation checks for specific files. Nothing is invented.
• Vendored lockwork is credited line by line: kit/ from the ACP kit; federation.py from the polymath — vendored on 2026-10-18, kept standalone on purpose.

Built on top of: mrfentmen/awesome-servers (the watcher runtime, the feeds) and mrfentmen/superagents (the polymath and the sentry, the first two agents this one borrows transport and lockwork from) and mrfentmen/fedora-hat and mrfentmen/instink and mrfentmen/contextink and mrfentmen/rewind and mrfentmen/scopink and mrfentmen/curious.