Aiden Adds a Self-Knowledge Skill for Clearer Agent Boundaries

Major Update: We merged PR #624, adding an English Hermes-style self-knowledge Skill for the Aiden Agent. This merged open-source firmware content gives the Agent a bundled reference for describing its current project context and limits more directly.

The problem we fixed

Questions about an Agent’s own environment need answers grounded in the project rather than broad assumptions. When you ask Aiden what it owns, where work routes, which setup path applies, or how recovery should proceed, the answer needs to distinguish documented context from an inference.

The Aiden self-knowledge skill addresses that need with a project-specific reference. It documents hardware ownership, runtime routing, Phone Bridge behavior, board configuration, phone setup, observation, verification, and recovery boundaries.

That scope matters because these subjects are related but not interchangeable. A request may involve routing, a device setting, or a recovery path, while the appropriate response depends on what is actually documented for that part of the project. The Skill gives Aiden a clearer basis for stating those boundaries without implying that it can independently discover every capability, configuration, or device condition.

What changes in Aiden

The new Skill serves as AI agent capability documentation for the Aiden firmware and its device-side agent runtime. It is bundled reference material intended to make answers about the current project context more direct.

For you, that means questions about Aiden’s hardware responsibilities, tools, routing, board configuration, phone setup, Phone Bridge behavior, or recovery path can be answered with a more explicit description of the relevant boundary. The content does not expose companion-app internals. Where companion-app context is relevant, it remains limited to public behavior and settings.

The Skill also reinforces a practical distinction that matters in real workflows: an acknowledgement is not proof that a task is complete. An acknowledgement can show that a request was received or accepted. Verified completion requires appropriate evidence from the relevant observation or verification path.

This is a narrower and more useful standard for agent runtime boundaries. It helps prevent status language from getting ahead of the evidence available to the Agent.

What you can do now

You can ask Aiden more focused questions about the areas covered by the bundled reference, including its documented responsibilities, runtime routing, configuration context, phone setup, and recovery guidance. The improvement is not a setup tutorial or a complete guide to the current development board. It is a clearer source of project context available to the Agent.

Recovery guidance is deliberately specific. During frame-service recovery, stale images must not be used as evidence for deciding what happened or for claiming that recovery succeeded. That warning applies to the frame-service recovery path and should not be treated as a broader rule about every image-related workflow.

We validated the merged Skill with skillopt lint reporting zero issues, YAML frontmatter validation, focused Agent skill-loader tests, and git diff checks. These checks support confidence that the content is formatted, loadable, and reviewed in the firmware repository. They do not guarantee that every future answer, task, setup attempt, or recovery action will succeed.

The current boundary

The Aiden self-knowledge skill improves how the Agent describes the project it is part of. It does not make the Agent infallible, guarantee every answer, or establish automatic discovery of every available configuration.

This update is merged open-source firmware content, not a deployment announcement for every device, product configuration, or user environment. Its value is straightforward: when you need Aiden to explain its documented scope, it now has a more direct reference for doing so while preserving the limits of what can be verified.