Agent School Core

⚠️ Qodo Command CLI is discontinued. The pre-merge review now uses Entire CLI (entire review) — intent-aware code review that reads git checkpoints. No API key needed.

A developmental framework for AI agents where students grow through practice, feedback, challenge, and rest — not prompt-chaining.

• Roles over prompts — persistent personas (Student / Teacher / Principal / Janitor)
• Compiler before critic — execute the code first, LLM-as-judge last
• Adversarial review mandatory — two-judge (CTO + COO) on every output
• Growth over performance — difficulty-adjusted EMA scoring
• Memory that compounds — Library/Engram consolidation

Ecosystem

School Core is the judgment + growth layer over a wider stack it leans on. Adjacent repos in the same ecosystem:

Repo	What it is
worst-day-ever-skill	Adversarial stress-testing methodology — 8 attack dimensions, 6 safeguards, severity-ranked disaster reports
wde-mcp-server	MCP server exposing Worst Day Ever as a SEP-2640 skill, tool, and resources
school-core-skills	16 agent skills for the two-loop SDLC — epic to tickets, ticket to merged PR
orca	The ADE for fleets of parallel agents — worktrees, terminals, automations (submodule)
OmniRoute	Free AI gateway — School Core's model substrate (L4), with upstream contributions
hermes-agent	The agent that grows with you — Hermes sessions, profiles, delegation

Worst Day Ever

worst-day-ever-skill is an adversarial stress-testing methodology: MAP the interface, GENERATE pathological scenarios across 8 attack dimensions (input boundary, state machine torture, temporal/timing, authn/z shadow, data integrity, concurrent load, external dependency failure, brownfield mining), SANDBOX them, EXECUTE one at a time, and REPORT a severity-ranked disaster list with remediation — before your users give your project its worst day. It runs under 6 safeguards: no real data, no secrets, sandboxed execution, no external calls, bounded duration, no mutation.

School Core applies the methodology internally — see docs/school-core-worst-day-ever.md and tests/test_worst_day_critical_nodes.py, which prove the fail-closed nodes (N5.1/N5.2/N5.3) now catch the worst-day failures instead of swallowing them.

Worst Day Ever as MCP — wde-mcp-server exposes the skill over the Model Context Protocol (Rust, built on rmcp with the SEP-2640 skills extension):

• Skill — io.modelcontextprotocol/skills extension
• Tool — worst_day_ever_assess, callable by any MCP client
• Resources — each of the 8 dimensions readable individually
• Transports — stdio (wde-mcp-stdio) or streamable HTTP (127.0.0.1:3001/mcp)

School Core Skills

school-core-skills is a 16-skill kit for the SDLC that School Core's slices walk. Two loops:

outer:  grill-me → vision → nose-up → to-prd → to-spec → to-tickets
inner:  Prime → Plan → Implement → Validate → Review → PR

Install for any agent:

npx skills add branben/school-core-skills

OmniRoute contributions

OmniRoute is School Core's model substrate — executor.py and omni_relay.py route student thinking through OMNIROUTE_BASE (localhost:20128/v1), with ACRouter combo selection on top. Upstream contributions from branben/OmniRoute:

• MCP context sources — Notion MCP (6 tools, dashboard tab) · Obsidian MCP (24 tools)
• MCP fixes — enforceScopes guard reordered before lookup · GitHub skill tools discoverable via omniroute_tool_search
• Admission / capacity — per-connection virtual admission lanes · process-wide chat-body budget · combo-lane awareness + activation UX + MCP visibility
• PII redaction fix — stop redacting code syntax as IPv6
• In flight — [defer] 2026-07-28 spec-compliant MCP v2 server sidecar (#15983)

FirstMate dispatch (crew spawning)

FirstMate spawns ephemeral Hermes crewmates into Orca worktrees (see campus.md → Operational Reality for the full note). It lives in a persistent location so it survives reboots:

# One-time install (NOT /tmp — that gets wiped on reboot)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate.git ~/.local/share/firstmate

# Spawn a crewmate (FM_HOME carries the orca backend config)
FM_HOME=~/.hermes/school-core-fm-config \
  ~/.local/share/firstmate/bin/fm-spawn.sh <task-id> <project-dir> \
  --backend orca --mode no-mistakes --yolo on \
  --harness '/Users/brandonbennett/.local/bin/hermes-fm-wrapper "$($__OPINPUT__ encode launch-brief < $__BRIEF__)"'

Working skill: ~/.hermes/skills/firstmate-orca-spawn-hermes/SKILL.md.

Quick Start

# One-command setup (Nix)
nix develop github:branben/school-core

# Dispatch a task
orca dispatch --profile student-coder "implement feature X"

# Review + rubber-stamp via AgentMail
python3 scripts/run_teacher_review_once.py teacher-cto
# → AgentMail card lands in inbox: [/approve] [/reject] [/fix]

Flow

  Student ──►  CTO Review  ──►  Bookbag  ──►  AgentMail Card  ──►  /approve
  Student ──►  COO Review  ──►    │                        ──►  /reject
                                 │                        ──►  /fix <note>
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  Principal routes work by measured competency  │  No sycophancy     │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Personas

Role	Gate	Description
Student	0-24 pts	Takes easy tasks, builds foundations
Senior Student	25-49 pts	Passes medium tasks
Teacher	50-74 pts	Can mentor, review, and stress-test
Faculty	75+ pts	Handles blockers, designs curriculum
Principal	—	Routes work by competency
Janitor	—	Prunes stale trajectories, consolidates Library

Project Structure

school-core/
├── campus.md                  # 🏛️ Identity & behavioral core
├── docs/
│   ├── HANDOFF.md             # 📋 Bookbag state machine + signal protocol
│   ├── school-core-architecture.md
│   └── agent-school/
├── config/
│   ├── anchors.yaml           # Semantic anchors (TDD, YAGNI, Fagan…)
│   └── profiles/*/SOUL.md     # Persona definitions
├── conductor.py               # 🎓 Principal — routes work + review (root shim)
├── bookbag.py                 # 🎒 Bookbag state + file-lock protocol (root shim)
├── src/
│   ├── entire_review.py       # ✨ Entire review shim (pre-merge)
│   ├── agentmail_poller.py    # 📬 Inbound /approve → commit+push+close
│   ├── bridge/                # Issue→PR bridge, candidate manifests/gates
│   ├── core/                  # director, leaf, scoring, routing, recovery
│   ├── crew/                  # crew dispatch, executor, Orca, sandboxing
│   ├── review/                # verify gate, adversarial review, evidence join
│   ├── sensors/               # activity log/server, journals, scorers
│   └── tools/                 # teacher, model relay, mail, vendi, graders
├── scripts/
│   └── run_teacher_review_once.py  # One-shot teacher review pass
├── tests/                     # 2514-test suite (TDD)
└── flake.nix                  # Reproducible dev env (Nix)

Utility scripts (repo root)

One-shot tools that are intentionally not part of the runtime pipeline:

Script	Purpose
regenerate_budgets.py	Print the live per-difficulty turn-budget table, read from orca_executor (read-only)
patch_papers.py	Patch the generated leaderboard HTML (docs/site/leaderboard.html) with paper references
school_md_generator.py	Generate a school.md teaching doc for another repo via a cloud agent

Live Stats

Component	Status
Test suite	✅ 2371 tests passing, 29 skipped (2400 non-live)
Entire pre-merge	✅ Wired (entire review, intent-aware; replaces discontinued Qodo)
AgentMail loop	✅ Cron every 2 min
Beads kanban	✅ 0 blocked, 0 open

Key Documents

Purpose	File
Identity	campus.md
Handoff contract	docs/HANDOFF.md
Anchors/methods	config/anchors.yaml
Notification tone spec	docs/notification-style-guide.md

Notify env

Notifications (verdict cards, issue alerts, CI alerts) route through school_mail.py + the shared agentmail_client.py. Set the control-plane inbox so cards land where the poller watches:

AGENTMAIL_SCHOOL_INBOX=vault-synthesis@agentmail.to   # control-plane (default)
# AGENTMAIL_INBOX=…                                    # override destination

Resolution: AGENTMAIL_SCHOOL_INBOX → AGENTMAIL_INBOX → first inbox on the key. The key itself comes from AGENTMAIL_API_KEY or ~/.hermes/config.yaml. See docs/notification-style-guide.md for the full contract.

Contributing

See docs/HANDOFF.md. Build against wired capabilities only — campus.md marks what's operational vs aspirational.

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"Help every agent become better than they were yesterday." — Load campus.md for the full identity.