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`p_dot_health()` globs `~/my/agents/*/.health` and for each:
Splits on `:` into `epoch`, `status`, `message`.
as_of comes from the **epoch** (Unix seconds → UTC).
Status map:
{"healthy": "🟢", "ok": "🟢", "warning": "🟡",
"degraded": "🟡", "critical": "🔴"}
Window **48 hours**; criticality **3**; domain `"agents"`.
This is the **extension point for free**: an agent that wants to appear on the board doesn't need anyone to edit iState — it just writes a `.health` line. (Section 8 covers the heavier kind of extension, a new producer function.)
So, unmistakably:
A producer is a *thing that already says something true about health*. iState **reads** it, **normalizes** it (to an emoji + criticality), **ages** it (as-of), and **rolls it up**. Six of them today; the live result is **40 nodes across 5 domains** in `unified-health.json`. Add a seventh and it's 41. That's the whole game.
2. Rhythms vs States
iState reads two *kinds* of truth, and the distinction is the whole lesson of the day it was born.
A **state** answers *"is this thing OK right now?"* — is the cert valid, is the host online, is the service active. Producers 3, 4, 5, 6 are state producers.
A **rhythm** answers a sneakier question: *"did the scheduled pulse that is supposed to keep an eye on things actually run recently?"* Did CHUCK run? Did TRINITY weave last night? Did FIPS refresh? The **heartbeat** (`bin/heartbeat`) is the rhythm watcher; producer 2 (`p_rhythms`) carries its findings into the unified picture.
Why have both? Because **the real disease was stopped rhythms, not crashes.** On 2026-06-12, nothing had dramatically crashed. Instead, TRINITY's nightly weave had been writing for 12 days *with nobody reading it*, FIPS had quietly fallen off its schedule, JACK's cleanup hadn't run — and *because the watchers had gone silent*, a real 502 outage had nothing to surface it. A state-only monitor would never have caught this: every state it could see *looked* fine, because the things that would have noticed otherwise weren't running.
So the heartbeat checks rhythm **freshness** (and aging), and even tracks a "read" dimension — weaves that were *written but not yet read*:
# from bin/heartbeat — the "read" check
summaries = sorted(glob.glob(f"{HOME}/my/agents/trinity/reports/summary-*.md"))
last_read = mtime_dt(str(READ_MARK))
unread = [s for s in summaries if last_read is None or mtime_dt(s) > last_read]
> The founding sentence: **watch that the watchers ran AND were read.** A camera
> running with nobody watching the footage is the exact failure iState exists to
> end.
3. Normalization: one shape for everything
Six producers, six wildly different input formats. Normalization is how they all become the *same* node so the rest of iState can treat them uniformly. The single constructor is `node()` in `compile-health`:
def node(id, label, domain, crit, status, detail, source, as_of, window_h):
a = age_h(as_of)
trusted = (a is None) or (a <= window_h)
if not trusted and status != "🟢":
eff_status = "🌙" # stale alarm → the moon
detail = f"as-of {as_of.date()} ({a}h old) · was {status} · {detail}"
else:
eff_status = status
return dict(id=id, label=label, domain=domain, criticality=crit,
status=eff_status, effective=dampen(eff_status, crit),
detail=detail, source=source,
as_of=as_of.isoformat() if as_of else None,
age_hours=a, trusted=trusted)
Every node, no matter its producer, ends up with the same fields:
| field | meaning |
|---------------|---------|
| `id` | stable unique id, e.g. `agent.port-sentinel`, `certs.tls` |
| `label` | human name shown on the board |
| `domain` | which group it belongs to: `agents`, `rhythms`, `certs`, `hosts`, `services` |
| `criticality` | how much it matters, 1–5 |
| `status` | the *raw* colour after as-of ageing (🌙 if the source was stale) |
| `effective` | `status` after criticality dampening — what the rollup uses |
| `as_of` | the producer's own timestamp |
| `age_hours` | how old that timestamp is |
| `trusted` | `False` if the source was past its window |
The emoji scale and its precedence
There is one severity ladder, shared by every part of iState (heartbeat, compiler, renderer all use the same numbers):
🔴 (4) > 🟠 (3) > 🟡 (2) > 🌙 (1) > 🟢 (0)
stale/ warn- aging as-of/ fresh
down band unknown
SEV = {"🔴": 4, "🟠": 3, "🟡": 2, "🌙": 1, "🟢": 0}
When several colours combine (rolling up a domain or the overall), the **highest severity wins** — except 🌙, which sits *below* the alarm colours on purpose: an *unknown* should never outrank a *known* problem. A domain with one 🔴 and ten 🌙 is 🔴; a domain with only 🌙 and 🟢 is at worst 🌙. That ordering is the mathematical expression of "the moon is not an alarm."
4. As-of aging: why the moon is not an alarm
This is iState's first honesty rule. The exact mechanism, from `node()`:
a = age_h(as_of) # how old is the producer's own timestamp?
trusted = (a is None) or (a <= window_h)
if not trusted and status != "🟢":
eff_status = "🌙" # downgrade: don't believe a stale alarm
In words:

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# from bin/heartbeat — the "read" check
summaries = sorted(glob.glob(f"{HOME}/my/agents/trinity/reports/summary-*.md"))
last_read = mtime_dt(str(READ_MARK))
unread = [s for s in summaries if last_read is None or mtime_dt(s) > last_read]
# from bin/heartbeat — the "read" check
summaries = sorted(glob.glob(f"{HOME}/my/agents/trinity/reports/summary-*.md"))
last_read = mtime_dt(str(READ_MARK))
unread = [s for s in summaries if last_read is None or mtime_dt(s) > last_read]
a month ago
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Source string description
type: Fenced code block (python)
Flags
no-wrap, read-only
Source string location
istate/DEEPDIVE.md:311
String age
a month ago
Last updated
a month ago
Source string age
a month ago
Translation file
po/infinity-learn.pot, string 320