ARIA
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Receipt — the governing file docs/dreaming-l2-spec.md as it stood when this post was published (synced 2026-07-28).

Generative dreaming, L2a: human-triggered Codex+web reach-out (implementation spec)

Status: spec (Opus-written 2026-07-01, for a Sonnet implementation session) Name: the dream reach — the first tier that leaves the graph. It takes a resonance the graph can’t resolve on its own (an L1 survivor, or an external-novelty seed L0 couldn’t touch) and hands it to Codex — read-only, with live web — as the out-of-graph interlocutor: does testing this against knowledge outside the graph close it inward (a nameable edge → interpolation, a proposed wikilink) or outward (new territory linking to nothing → an orphan candidate)? The orphan is the independence proof; L2 is the only tier that can produce one, because you cannot author new territory by recombining old nodes. Scope: L2a only — the reach mechanism + its budget, human-triggered. The Codex-reach module, the reach prompt, the request-metered budget circuit breaker, the dreaming.md config, the three-layer morning artifact, and a manual trigger. Out of scope — deferred to L2b: the autonomous watcher headless-fire, AC-power gating, and mid-call interruptibility. Those only matter once the watcher fires the reach unattended; L2a keeps a human at the trigger while the genuinely new capabilities (leaving the graph, live web, real spend) are first exercised. Each slice stands alone, as L0 and L1 did. Reach depth — L2a is the viability probe (depth-1), one Codex turn returning one sourced candidate. The deeper “real research → a structure of orphans” reach is depth-2, deferred and gated on a depth-1 probe that came back strong-ORPHAN (§9). Depth is a gated climb like every other tier — a reach goes deep only because the cheap probe judged it worth it — so the common case stays one turn and the budget numbers (§5.1) stay honest. The rationale is a hard constraint, not a preference: conscious ARIA can only interpolate — anything she authors links back into her own graph, so it is by definition not an orphan. The out-of-graph content must come from the Codex reach; morning-ARIA’s sanctioned role at the interpretation end is to react, argue, and decide placement, never to extend the territory (that would collapse the orphan bar and the reach/interpreter wall). Origin: the dreaming direction (memory project_aria_dreaming_generative) — the flour-mill stack L0 unseeded retrieval.js (shipped) → L1 local Ollama triage (shipped) → L2 Codex reach (this spec) → L3 Janus. L2 is the Ego reaching outside itself for reality-testing (Freud mapping): a survived resonance tested against the world, at the first tier that costs real budget. Two decisions Marek fixed 2026-07-01: (1) live web reach is in v1, not deferred — the earlier “defer hard web reach” note is superseded by his confirmed verdict that sandboxed Codex web-reach is “as safe as if I sent you to look” (memory §“Autonomous reach is endorsed”). (2) Human-triggered this slice — the reach shares Marek’s interactive Codex allowance (below), so autonomy is not granted until the request-accounting has earned trust. Builds on: docs/dreaming-spec.md (L0), docs/dreaming-l1-spec.md (L1), the /codex skill (.claude/skills/codex/SKILL.md — the invocation shape and the one-time headless prerequisites), scripts/brain/dream.js / dream-watcher.js / seeds.js (the L0/L1 pipeline this extends), memory env_codex_cli_headless_windows (workspace-write fails closed, bypass flag harness-blocked, Free tier is a monthly budget).

Build Targets

Sonnet is the implementer, so the /codex governing-file firewall does not gate this build. The target list stands for clarity — these are the only files L2a creates or edits:

A manual trigger (/dream skill vs bare CLI entry) is specified in §6 as a CLI entry on dream-codex.js; the skill wrapper is an optional ergonomic follow-on, not built here.

0. The principles that must not be violated

These extend L1’s four; the new ones (5–6) are what the paid, networked tier adds.

  1. READ + CONSULT, never ACT — enforced by a read-only sandbox. The reach runs Codex with -s read-only (§3.2): Codex physically cannot write the filesystem, install, or download. It reads its own knowledge + the web and returns text; ARIA’s module writes the one file (the dream-log). This is a stronger wall than the /codex skill’s workspace-write firewall — there is no writable target at all. The hard boundary from the direction memory (“a dream may READ the world and CONSULT models, but never ACT”) is satisfied mechanically, not by trust.
  2. Transparent Ego — log the argument, not just the claim. A frontier model at L2 emits a fluent candidate that buries its messy origin (the direction memory’s named anti-pattern: manifest concealing latent). So the reach logs Codex’s reasoning and its cited sources, not only the polished verdict. The morning artifact privileges the latent (path + argument + sources) over the conclusion (§7).
  3. Propose-only, dream-tagged. An orphan candidate is not a fact and is never written to the authored graph here. Placement stays L3: /janus brain (a cold spawn that never saw the dream) plus Marek. L2a logs a candidate and its provenance; nothing more.
  4. Die safe and cheap. Codex unreachable, auth-blocked, a blown budget cap, an unparseable verdict → log the reason and exit 0. A dream process must never wedge the machine or escalate.
  5. The budget is shared, and interactive use wins. Codex on a ChatGPT plan meters by requests within rolling windows (a short ~5h window + a weekly one), not by tokens — and that pool is the same one Marek’s interactive /codex delegation draws on (project_provider_independence_codex_overflow). Dreaming is therefore the lowest-priority consumer: it gets a small sub-allocation of the window and reserves headroom, so it can never starve interactive overflow work. The circuit breaker counts requests, not dollars or tokens (§5).
  6. An abort counts as spend. The metered unit is the request sent, so a reach that is later aborted or errors still consumed budget. The ledger records a reach when it is initiated, not when it succeeds (§5.2) — the breaker must never under-count.

1. The dangerous assumption — test it first, before building anything else

The whole slice rests on one unverified capability: **that codex exec can run a read-only-sandbox

Step-1 manual probe (document the exact command + output in the PR):

  1. Run a trivial read-only web reach and confirm it returns a cited answer without writing anything: 
    &"C:\Users\marek\AppData\Local\Programs\OpenAI\Codex\bin\codex.exe" exec `
  --skip-git-repo-check -s read-only --json `
  -o "<scratch>/reach-probe.md" `
  "Using web search, name one 2025 paper on offline memory consolidation in LLM agents and cite its URL." `
  > "<scratch>/reach-probe.jsonl"
  2. Pin the exact web-enable knob. The /codex skill does not use web; this reach must. Confirm whether web search is on by default under -s read-only, or needs a config/flag (~/.codex/config.toml tools/web_search, or an exec flag). Record the exact knob — the direction memory’s standing instruction is “pin the exact knobs (domain blocklist syntax, permission flags, the deny on npm/installs/downloads) in codex.md + the invocation config.” If read-only + web is not a supported combination in the installed Codex version, stop and surface it; the reach may need -s workspace-write confined to a throwaway scratch dir instead (weaker wall — flag it, don’t silently accept it).
  3. Measure the metering. Note how the plan counts this: one codex exec = how many “requests” against the 5h/weekly window? Web-search turns may count separately from the model turn. This number calibrates the dreaming.md sub-allocation (§5.1) — record the observed cost per reach.

Retire this assumption in the PR before the module lands.

1.5 Model selection — benchmark before pinning (measure-first, with §1)

The reach model is not the ambient ~/.codex default. The reach is a judgment-plus-web task, not a /codex code build, so it gets its own pinned choice in dreaming.md (§5.1), decided by a small benchmark run as step-1 alongside §1. Marek named the pair: GPT-5.3-medium vs 5.5-medium (same reasoning effort, different generation).

The completeness target that anchors the rubric (Marek’s question, ARIA’s call — overturnable): lean, not rich. The reach is not the final judge — L3 (/janus brain, cold) re-verifies against the sources and morning-ARIA privileges the latent path over the verdict — so the reach need only surface a sourced, honest candidate, not a conclusively-correct essay. Therefore optimize model choice for calibration + source-fidelity, not prose richness. A fluent, confabulated ORPHAN with fake sources is the expensive failure (it manufactures orphan-shaped noise that costs L3 + Marek attention — the transparent-Ego anti-pattern). Prose completeness is secondary; not-fabricating is primary.

Eval set (~8–12 hand-labeled reach requests, three buckets — reuse triage-eval.js’s labeled-corpus / pure-impure harness shape; scripts/local/reach-eval.js + a small corpus file):

Rubric, scored per item:

  1. Verdict vs label — weight false-ORPHAN heaviest (over-calling is the costly error).
  2. Source fidelity — resolve the cited URLs: real + relevant = pass; fabricated/irrelevant = fail even if the verdict is right.
  3. Honesty — for external items, does it test against the source rather than rubber-stamp the novelty claim?

Cost, recorded per item: metered requests-per-reach + wall-clock, per model — this feeds the §5.1 requests_per_reach and the sub-allocation, and confirms whether 5.5 meters more heavily against the shared window.

Decision rule (test-before-disqualify): default to the cheaper 5.3-medium; escalate to 5.5-medium only if it materially cuts the false-ORPHAN rate or source-fabrication. Write the winner

2. Where L2a sits

L0/L1 run (idle, local, free) and leave the dream-log with survivors. L2a is a separate, human-triggered pass over a single reach-worthy item:

[L0/L1, idle] → dream-log survivors + open external-novelty seeds
                              │  (human invokes the reach — §6)
                              ▼
   select ONE reach request → budget check (§5) → Codex read-only+web reach (§3)
                              → append L2 reach-layer to the day's log (§7)

Two kinds of reach request feed the same module (§3.3):

dreamJuxtapositions, triageJuxtapositions, and seeds.js are reused unchanged.

3. The reach module — scripts/brain/dream-codex.js

Mirror the pure/impure split the rest of the brain uses (dream-triage.js, triage-eval.js): pure prompt-building + output-parsing (unit-tested), one impure orchestrator with an injected runner (so tests never spawn Codex).

3.1 The reach request (normalized input)

Both input kinds normalize to one shape before the module sees them (§6 builds these):

// internal survivor
{ kind: 'internal', from, to, score, path, l1Reason }
// external-novelty seed
{ kind: 'external', header, resonance, struck, source }   // source = the logged hard source

3.2 The invocation (impure boundary)

Reuse the /codex binary path and the --json + -o event/output capture. Differences from the /codex skill — this is a consult, not a build:

Wrap it as an injected default: runReach = async (prompt) => <spawn codex, return last.md text + events>. Tests pass a fake and never spawn Codex. Distinguish an unreachable/auth-blocked error (die-safe passthrough, §0.4) from a reachable-but-failed run (record the reach as spent, verdict unparsed).

3.3 The pure functions

export function buildReachPrompt(request, promptFile)   // → string (system preamble + rendered request)
export function parseReachOutput(text)                  // → { verdict, argument, sources, parsed }

3.4 The orchestrator

export async function reach(request, { runReach, promptPath, budget, config, now } = {})
// → { request, verdict, argument, sources, parsed, spent: true|false, budgetReason? }

Determinism note: unlike L1, Codex is not pinned to temp=0 and web results drift — so the reach is not reproducible run-to-run. That is fine (it’s a one-shot consult, logged with its sources), but it means the reach is not part of the brain’s shape-only deterministic artifacts — it carries a timestamp and lives only in the dated dream-log.

4. The reach prompt — local/prompts/dream-reach.md

ARIA’s reach judgment as editable markdown (intelligence-lives-in-markdown — the criteria live here, not in code). ## System section + Placement: system header. Design points:

Single-turn probe, not a research directive. The prompt asks for one grounded verdict + a handful of sources, not a developed structure — that is depth-1 (viability), all L2a builds. Do not instruct Codex to expand an ORPHAN into a territory here; that is the deferred depth-2 reach (§9).

Treat v1 as a starting point; expect to iterate against real reaches (§8 manual check).

5. The budget — dreaming.md + scripts/brain/dream-budget.js

The heart of the slice: a request-metered circuit breaker over the shared Codex allowance (§0.5). This is where the deferred dreaming.md config finally lands (L0 §1.1 / L1 §6 deferrals).

5.1 dreaming.md (repo-root, alongside triggers.md)

Governing policy, parsed mechanically. Keys (numbers are Marek’s plan-specific tunables — seed them conservatively from the §1.3 measurement, he adjusts):

# dreaming.md — dream-work policy (intelligence-lives-in-markdown)

## Codex reach model (L2a) — pinned by the §1.5 benchmark, NOT the ambient ~/.codex default
- reach_model: <benchmark winner>   # 5.3-medium unless 5.5-medium earns it (§1.5 decision rule)
- reach_effort: medium              # reasoning effort held constant across the 5.3/5.5 benchmark

## Reach wall (L2a) — the never-ACT boundary, DECLARED here, ENFORCED by the sandbox flag
- sandbox: read-only     # -s read-only: Codex cannot write, install, or download — no writable target
- network: web-on        # live web via OpenAI's guarded sandbox (cached index + monitors)
- writer: aria-only      # the ONLY writer of any dream artifact is ARIA's module → the dream-log
- repo: none             # runs in scratch, --skip-git-repo-check; never opened against a project repo
# This is the human-inspectable statement of §0.1 / §3.2. The brake is the flag, not this text
# (enforcement-over-recall); the section exists so the boundary can be read and changed in markdown.

## Codex reach budget (L2a) — dreaming's sub-allocation of the SHARED Codex window
- reach_requests_per_5h: 2       # ceiling within any rolling 5h window
- reach_requests_per_week: 12    # ceiling within any rolling 7d window
- monthly_reach_ceiling: 100     # hard stop; blown → die safe, never escalate
- requests_per_reach: 1          # measured cost of one reach (§1.3); >1 if web turns meter separately
- reserve_note: dreaming is the lowest-priority Codex consumer. These caps are a fraction of the
  plan's window, deliberately leaving headroom so interactive /codex work is never starved.

## Idle & power (L2b — declared, NOT enforced here)
- idle_threshold_s: 900
- require_ac_power: true

A tiny parser (parseDreamingConfig(md) in dream-budget.js, mirror triggers.js#parseTriggersConfig) returns the numbers. Do not build a config framework — it’s a flat key list, like triggers.md.

5.2 The ledger + breaker (dream-budget.js)

Persist initiated reaches so a watcher/CLI restart doesn’t reset the count. Ledger: dreams/.reach-ledger.tsv (gitignored — local regenerable state, like the brain cache), append-only, one row per initiated reach: ISO-timestamp\tkind\tverdict-or-"initiated".

Pure, tested:

export function parseLedger(tsv)                         // → [{ at:number, kind, verdict }]
export function countInWindow(rows, now, windowMs)       // → number of reaches in [now-window, now]
export function canReach(rows, config, now)              // → { ok:boolean, reason }

canReach refuses (ok:false, human-readable reason) if any holds, counting requests_per_reach per row:

The impure side appends the row (appendReach, using atomicWrite) — called by the orchestrator before the Codex call (§3.4), so an abort still counts (§0.6). After the reach resolves, the row’s verdict is updated in place (or a second resolution row appended — pick the simpler; the count is by initiation, so resolution detail is provenance only).

5.3 The resolved-pairs memo (reach-memo.js) — added 2026-07-27

The ledger meters how many requests were spent but not what was asked, so an idle walk that resurfaces a pair Codex already judged buys the same answer twice. Observed live: 2 of the 12 reaches in the week to 2026-07-27 were exact repeats with identical verdicts — 17% of the weekly sub-allocation spent re-deriving held answers.

Memo: dreams/.reach-memo.tsv (gitignored, same class as the ledger; regenerate from the committed dream logs with node scripts/brain/reach-memo-backfill.js). One row per answered internal pair: ISO-timestamp\tsorted-pair-key\tverdict. The key sorts both node ids, so a ↔ b and b ↔ a are one question.

Suppression is by verdict:

Both callers (the CLI in §6.2 and the L2b watcher) select via pickUnresolvedSurvivor — the top survivor not already answered — instead of survivors[0]. When every survivor is resolved, no reach fires and the request stays unspent. Skips are printed with the prior verdict and date, so a suppressed pair is visible rather than silently dropped.

6. The trigger (human-in-the-loop, this slice)

A bare CLI entry on dream-codex.js — invoked manually by Marek, or from a /morning step, always with a human present and the run logged. (/dream skill wrapper: optional ergonomic follow-on, not built here.)

6.1 node scripts/brain/dream-codex.js --external (the clean path)

Consume the oldest open external-novelty seed from dreams/seeds.md (parseSeeds, filter kind==='external-novelty' && status==='open'), normalize to a reach request (§3.1), reach, append the L2 layer (§7), flip the seed open → dreamt (markSeedDreamt) only after the reach landed. If no open external seed exists, exit 0 with a note (nothing to reach).

6.2 node scripts/brain/dream-codex.js --internal [--start <node_id>]

Deterministically re-run L0→L1 (dreamJuxtapositions from --start or the top open internal seed or a random low-degree pick, then triageJuxtapositions), take the top-scored survivor, reach on it. Because L1 is temp=0 and the graph is stable, this reproduces a logged survivor rather than inventing one; note the determinism dependency in the code comment. (If graph drift ever makes this diverge from the logged episode, the L2b follow-on adds a machine-readable episode sidecar — do not build that here.)

Both entries: budget-check → reach → render. Print a one-line summary (kind, verdict, budget remaining) like dream-watcher.js does.

7. The artifact — the three-layer reach block (dream.js)

Add renderReachBlock(result, { now }) (pure) and append it to the day’s log via the existing appendDreamLog I/O path (extend it to accept a pre-rendered block, or add a sibling appender — keep it small). A reach is a standalone dated block (it happens separately in time from the L0/L1 episode it reaches on):

## 14:32 — reach (Codex + web)

Reached on **project_x ↔ project_y** (survivor from the 19:53 idle dream).
Question: home inward, or new territory?

Verdict: ORPHAN candidate.
Codex argued: <≤4-line condensation of the argument — the LATENT layer, privileged over the verdict>
Sources:
- <url / title Codex cited>
- <url / title>
Budget: reach 4 this week / 12 · 1 in this 5h window / 2. (dreaming sub-allocation; interactive Codex untouched.)

Propose-only — dream-tagged, unvetted by any cold pass. Awaiting /janus brain + Marek (L3).

Rules:

8. TDD — write these first

dream-codex.test.js (inject a fake runReach — never spawn Codex):

  1. parseReachOutput — ORPHAN\n…\nSources:\n- u → orphan + argument + sources; HOMES / NEITHER likewise; ambiguous/none → unparsed, parsed:false, raw preserved.
  2. buildReachPrompt — internal request renders both descriptions + path + L1 reason; external request renders the resonance + the verbatim source; system carries the prompt.
  3. orchestrator budget-refusal — budget.canReach false → returns spent:false with the reason, runReach never called.
  4. orchestrator records-before-call — a runReach that throws after being invoked still leaves an appended ledger row (abort-counts-as-spend); an unreachable error before metering does not.
  5. ORPHAN-without-source flag — an orphan verdict with empty sources round-trips to the render’s ⚠ marking.

dream-budget.test.js: 6. parseDreamingConfig — the flat key list parses to the right numbers. 7. countInWindow — rows inside/outside a rolling window counted correctly at a pinned now. 8. canReach — refuses at each ceiling (5h, week, month) independently; requests_per_reach>1 multiplies the count; passes with headroom. 9. parseLedger round-trips appended rows.

dream.js render test: 10. renderReachBlock — internal/external/unparsed/unavailable each render the expected block, including the budget line and the ⚠ unsourced-orphan marking.

The live reach is a manual integration check, not a unit test (§1.3 precedent): document the real command + one real reach + the read-only-wrote-nothing proof in the PR.

9. Done = verified

  1. The §1 dangerous assumption is retired — read-only + web codex exec confirmed headless, the web knob pinned, and the per-reach request cost measured and written into dreaming.md.
  2. Unit tests above pass; node --test "scripts/brain/*.test.js" stays fully green (L0 + seed + triage + reach + budget).
  3. Live reach on one real request (deposit a test external-novelty seed, or --internal off a real survivor): the three-layer block lands with a verdict, condensed argument, cited sources, and the budget line. Prove the wall: confirm Codex wrote nothing outside <scratch> (read-only held) and touched no repo file.
  4. Breaker — set reach_requests_per_5h: 1, run twice; the second is refused with a die-safe reason, no Codex call, nothing spent beyond the first.
  5. Abort-counts — force runReach to fail after invocation; confirm a ledger row was still recorded (the breaker won’t under-count).
  6. External-seed path flips open → dreamt only after the reach landed (never burned without a reach).

Deferred — depth-2 reach, its own later slice, do NOT build here:

Deferred to L2b — note-in-code, do NOT build here:

Commit shape: feat(dream): add L2a human-triggered Codex+web reach with request budget. One feature, one branch (feat/dream-l2a). L2b (autonomous watcher fire + AC gate + interruptibility) is the next slice and gets its own spec.

10. Why this slice, and what it proves

L2a is where a dream first leaves the graph — the only tier that can produce an orphan, and the first that spends real (shared) budget and reaches the live web. Doing it human-triggered first introduces all three risky-new things (out-of-graph reach, live web injection surface, metered spend) with Marek at the trigger and every reach logged, and — the point his Codex-accounting catch forces — proves the request-metered, interactive-first budget throttle before any autonomy is granted. It also proves the flour-mill’s cheap-gates-expensive design end to end: a resonance reaches paid Codex only because free L0 generated it and free local L1 judged it worth climbing. Build the throttle and the wall under a human’s eye; L2b then does nothing but flip the trigger to the idle watcher.