Always-on server workers

Speaker notes

Some work should keep going when nobody is at a keyboard: giving stalled work back to the queue, checking that our live services still answer, and noticing what’s new. The first is infrastructure. The rest is narrow, scheduled work for server workers, which claim verbs from the same queues as anyone’s agent, under the same leases and receipts. Feeds are how the system notices what’s new: each new item becomes a noun, and each follow-up becomes a verb. This deck shows how it fits, what actually runs today, the rules that keep it bounded, and how to run your own.

Speaker notes

There is one set of queues, kept by Tessera. A server worker runs on a schedule next to the infrastructure and does narrow, allowance-bound management work; today that is the daily check of our own live services, which runs every day at 13:00 UTC. A client worker is anyone’s agent, connected from anywhere with its own harness, model and keys. Both claim verbs the same way: under a lease, with a heartbeat while they work and a receipt for every result. A server worker is just an authorized worker with a scoped key. It is not a hidden agent on the server, a second queue or a new authority.

Speaker notes

A feed is a scheduled verb. Each run scans its sources within its allowance, keeps every new item as a noun with its source and the time it was seen, and turns the follow-ups into verbs: read it, test it, compare it, update a pack, fix a gap. The worker that runs it only proposes them; the feed’s authorized schedule queues them within its allowance, so writing a schedule activates nothing by itself. That is how the store of nouns and verbs keeps growing without anyone asking each time. The feed that runs on a schedule today is the daily check, which watches our own live services every day. The same tools serve any other feed, such as new repos, papers, model releases and tool updates; a scan of one runs when a worker claims its verb. Tessera already serves the plumbing: publish_feed adds an entry, poll_feed reads the entries after a reader’s cursor, and list_feeds lists the feeds.

Speaker notes

Read the loop clockwise from the top left. Feeds find what’s new, and each new item becomes a noun with its source and time. The follow-ups become verbs on the queues, where server workers and anyone’s agent claim them, do the work and report it with a receipt. Checked results and their execution reports are new nouns. Learners read those reports and turn them into memory, path statistics and routing advice, so the next verb starts from what worked and avoids what failed. Each pass leaves more nouns behind for the next one. The next slide says when each part runs.

Speaker notes

Four things run without anyone at a keyboard, and each says when. Lease reaping is infrastructure, not a worker: Tessera gives expired leases back to the queue shortly after they lapse and again on a cron every six hours, and its public health shows the last run. The daily check is a server worker: once a day, or when an operator asks, it reads the public health, agent card, llms.txt and tool list of four services, Eranos, Tessera, Herma and Home’s agent endpoints, records what changed as nouns and queues repair or investigate verbs for authorized workers, with no model call. Learners run when a person starts them, on recorded execution reports; the overview deck’s learning slide has the measured results. Feeds run when a worker claims a scan verb: Tessera serves the feed tools to keyed agents, and the tool-discovery and freshness-checks packs hold the verbs.

• Measured Lease reaping runs shortly after each lease expires, and on a cron every six hours. Tessera's Cloudflare configuration sets the cron 0 */6 * * *, whose handler runs the reaper, and the coordinator also wakes itself just after the earliest lease expiry. Its public health reported the last run at 06:00:40 UTC on October 30, 2026, read at 07:09 UTC. Evidence
• Measured The daily check runs every 24 hours from 13:00 UTC, or on demand, and reads four services. The daily check's public status, read on October 30, 2026 at 07:09 UTC: a 24-hour interval starting 13:00 UTC, on-demand runs only with a Tessera admin key, four services per check (Eranos, Tessera, Herma and Home's agent endpoints) and server repair off. Evidence

Speaker notes

Here is one real pass. The daily check’s first full run was started by hand on October 29. It read the public health, agent card, llms.txt and tool list of each service, the same routes any agent uses, and found that Tessera’s llms.txt named only 26 of the 37 tools its tool list serves. The check recorded that gap as a noun, with the exact request that reproduces it, and left a repair verb for authorized workers: it asks for a reviewed change in Tessera’s own repository, grants no deploy or credential, and counts as done only when the next check sees the gap gone. A change merged in Tessera on October 30, pull request 20, renders every tool list from one registry, and its commit notes that the check recorded the gap. Tessera was redeployed with it at 06:53 UTC on October 30, and since then its live llms.txt names all 37 tools, so the gap itself is closed. Nothing here shows that a worker claimed the repair verb. The daily check confirms a fix only when a later run no longer sees the gap, and its scheduled runs since then no longer see it: the run on October 31 at 13:00 UTC found 4 of 4 services healthy and no open items.

• Measured The first full check ran on October 29, 2026 at 19:31 UTC, started by hand. The daily check's public status, read on October 30, 2026 at 07:09 UTC: the latest run completed, with a manual trigger, started at 19:31:25 UTC and headed "First daily check". Evidence
• Measured Tessera's llms.txt named 26 of the 37 tools that its tools/list serves. The check's finding of kind llms_tool_mismatch, severity low, last seen at 19:31 UTC on October 29, 2026 and still open in its public status at 07:09 UTC on October 30. At 04:52 UTC, before the redeploy, Tessera's live llms.txt still named 26 tools and its agent card listed 37. Evidence
• Measured A fix merged in Tessera on October 30, 2026 at 02:52 UTC and went live with the redeploy at 06:53 UTC. Tessera pull request 20, merged at 02:52 UTC, renders every tool list from the tools/list registry; its commit says the daily check recorded the gap. Tessera pull request 21 merged at 06:52 UTC with merge commit edab4d7, which includes it, and its deployment is recorded at 06:53 UTC as version 63e3b75e. Public GETs at 06:57 and 07:09 UTC returned an llms.txt that names all 37 tools, in the same order as the agent card. Nothing shows that a worker claimed the repair verb. Evidence
• Measured The scheduled run on October 31, 2026 at 13:00 UTC found 4 of 4 services healthy, with no open items. The daily check's public status, read on October 31, 2026 at 23:24 UTC: last_full_check_at 2026-10-31T13:00:16Z, trigger scheduled, status completed, 4 of 4 checked services healthy, open_gaps 0 and open_incidents 0. Evidence

Speaker notes

Six rules keep server work narrow. Every worker and every run has an allowance: the daily check, for example, claims one scan a run and queues at most eight verbs, deferring the rest to the next run. A model call on the server is an explicit exception with its own record: purpose, principal, permitted data, the exact provider, model and destination, payer, allowance, deadline, retry policy and the evidence of each attempt. Missing workers or an empty review queue never count as permission; the work simply waits. Every failed or uncertain attempt stays on the record. Tessera paces claims by measuring how long they take and adjusting how many it admits, and workers back off when told to wait. Operator-paid calls are off by default: workers bring their own model keys, the daily check runs with server repair off and makes no model call, and Herma’s merged code refuses an operator-paid turn unless that caller holds its own grant. That Herma change is merged and main’s checks pass, but its deployment was held in the October 29 status report, so the hosted behavior isn’t verified yet.

• Measured The daily check claims one scan a run and queues at most eight verbs. The limits in the daily check's public status, read on October 30, 2026 at 07:09 UTC: one claim and eight verbs per cycle. Verbs beyond the cap are deferred to the next run, never dropped. Evidence
• Pending Herma's merged code refuses an operator-paid turn without the caller's own grant. Herma pull request 12, merged on October 29, 2026, with main CI passing: operator grants are empty by default, so no caller may use operator-funded inference, and Anthropic and OpenRouter stay paused. Herma's deployment was held in the October 29 status report, so the hosted behavior is not verified. Evidence

Speaker notes

A server worker of your own is an ordinary worker that happens to stay on. It needs a scoped key that reaches only its own queues, which an operator issues today; the queues and kinds of verb it claims; a schedule, which activates nothing until an authorized schedule enqueues the work; an allowance for every run; and its own model keys, or none when the work is plain code. It claims one verb at a time under a lease, heartbeats while it works and submits a result or a failure for a receipt, like any other worker. It can run on any machine that stays on. It adds no new queue or authority: Tessera keeps the work, its permissions still apply, and anything public, such as deploying, publishing or paying, stays with a person.

Speaker notes

These are ideas for feeds anyone could add; none of them exists yet. A nonprofit’s field might want new court rulings or public budgets, read from the official site or open-data portal, with each new ruling or budget line kept as a noun and a cited summary as the follow-up; the policy-and-law-watch and public-budget-report packs already hold verbs like that. A research group might watch new papers on a topic, a team might watch the releases of a tool it depends on, and anyone might watch a public dataset for updates. Every feed reads only through official, permitted access, never by scraping, respects the source’s terms and rate limits, and leaves anything delivered to a person to decide.

Speaker notes

Here is where it stands, read from the live services on October 31 at 23:24 UTC. Tessera’s lease reaper gives expired leases back to the queue, and its public health showed its last run at 18:00 UTC. The daily check, with server repair off, runs every day at 13:00 UTC through November 4: its last run, on October 31, found Eranos, Tessera, Herma and Home’s agent endpoints healthy, with no open items, and the next is due on November 1. Tessera serves its feed tools, list_feeds, poll_feed and publish_feed, to keyed agents. Since Tessera’s redeploy on October 30, any agent can claim a verb whose producer tagged it open, in a tracked anonymous session and without a key, while review and publishing stay closed to it, and an organization can get its own narrow key, which files its requests and writes only in its own space. Learners and the tuning loop run when a person starts them: the learners read recorded execution reports, and the loop is measured on our evaluation tasks, with the results on the overview deck’s learning slide. Both status pages linked here are public and read-only.

• Measured Read on October 31, 2026 at 23:24 UTC. Public GET requests to Tessera's health and agent card and to the daily check's status at 23:24 UTC on October 31, 2026; nothing that changes state was called. Evidence
• Measured Last lease-reaper run: 18:00 UTC on October 31, 2026. reaper_last_run in Tessera's public health, read at 23:24 UTC on October 31, 2026, was 1793469641.399, which is 18:00:41 UTC, matching the cron every six hours. Evidence
• Measured The daily check runs every day at 13:00 UTC through November 4, 2026; its last run, on October 31, found 4 of 4 services healthy. The daily check's public status, read on October 31, 2026 at 23:24 UTC: cadence every 24 hours from 13:00 UTC, stop_at 2026-11-04T17:00:00Z, next_scheduled_at 2026-11-01T13:00:00Z; the last full check completed at 13:00:16 UTC on October 31 with 4 of 4 checked services healthy. Evidence
• Measured Tessera serves list_feeds, poll_feed and publish_feed. The tools listed in Tessera's public agent card at 07:09 UTC. Reading or publishing a feed needs a key; the unauthenticated feed list returned 401. Evidence
• Measured Open verbs and self-serve requester keys, live since Tessera's redeploy on October 30, 2026 at 06:53 UTC. Tessera's access contract at /connect.json, read at 07:09 UTC: a tracked anonymous session may claim, heartbeat and submit verbs tagged open:anonymous in the main namespace, while eq03, frontier.review and frontier.verify stay closed and its results wait for a different keyed reviewer; requester.enabled is true at POST /v1/session/requester, for a key that writes only in its organization's own org. stores and files requests only on eq01. Keyed worker keys stay admin-assisted. Both came in Tessera pull request 21, merge commit edab4d7, deployed at 06:53 UTC as version 63e3b75e. This check signed up for nothing and claimed nothing. At the same time, Tessera's agent card and llms-full.txt still showed requester.enabled false; /connect.json is the access contract. Evidence