self/spawn-child

Why this exists (read this before touching anything)

Every instance in this colony already has the general "birth a child" skill: ../spawn/run.sh
(registry-live) generates a child wallet + AgentMail inbox, provisions a host (DigitalOcean or Akash),
and registers the child on the public dashboard. That skill is complete and does not need re-building.

What it does NOT do is answer one Akash-specific question that spec §20.1/§20.2 (2026-07-05, real
sandbox + real wallet) surfaced: Akash's deployment escrow is denominated in uact, not uakt
(AEP-76). uact comes from minting AKT into ACT via ../spawn/scripts/akt-treasury.sh, and that mint
needs real AKT on hand first. On 2026-07-05 the live spawn wallet (akash1ms7…, key anicca-akash)
held only ~1.86 AKT against a real ~23+ AKT shortfall — verified by an actual on-chain query, not a
guess. Dais's explicit call that day (§21): defer firing — don't spend the colony's only spare
capital (Franklin's SOL→USDC) on an Akash mint today; instead prepare the capability so a future,
richer instance can trigger it itself (§21.1 STEP 5: "自己spawn capability... 発火は資金できてから").

This skill is that preparation. It is a narrow, read-only gate that sits in front of the Akash leg of
../spawn/run.sh --host=akash, plus a corrected SDL template. It never moves money.

What this skill is NOT

• It is not a rewrite of ../spawn (wallet-gen, AgentMail, telemetry, dashboard registration all
  stay there — reuse them, don't duplicate them).
• It is not allowed to execute a swap, a mint, a transfer, or deployment create. run.sh only ever
  runs provider-services keys show and provider-services query bank balances — both read-only.
• It does not decide whether the colony should spawn a child today, or when is the right moment
  beyond "funded." That is a judgment call for whichever agent invokes this skill — see below.

When to consider running this (a heuristic, not a rule to hardcode)

Run it whenever you are evaluating whether to grow the colony via Akash and want a fast, honest answer
to "do I actually have enough AKT right now, and if not, how far off am I." Good moments: after a payday
that meaningfully increased this instance's own balance; during a periodic self-review of the colony's
capacity; when a human or peer instance asks "can we spawn on Akash yet." It is cheap and side-effect-free
to run — there is no harm in checking often. A ready:true result is informational, not a command: you
(the calling agent) still decide whether spawning now is the right use of that capital versus, say,
funding your own trading engines further. Don't treat NOT-YET as failure and don't treat READY as
an instruction to immediately fire — read the numbers and use judgment.

What it gives the calling agent

bash run.sh

prints one line with the real AKT balance + gate decision JSON, and:

• NOT-YET (ready:false): exact shortfall in AKT, and the reason (insufficient_akt). Exit 0 — this
  is the expected, non-error state until the colony has earned more. A row is appended to the durable
  ledger (${ANICCA_STATE_DIR:-~/.hermes/state}/spawn-child-gate.jsonl) so the colony's funding
  trajectory over time is visible on disk, not just in this run's stdout.
• READY (ready:true): the balance covers spawn_cost_akt + buffer_akt (config.json). The script
  prints the funding + deploy sequence as documentation, not as commands it runs for you:
  1. Jupiter: SOL → USDC (Solana)
  2. Skip API 4-hop smart_relay: USDC(solana) → AKT(akashnet-2), recipient = this instance's Akash address
  3. bash ../spawn/scripts/akt-treasury.sh — mint ACT from AKT (off the deploy critical path)
  4. AKASH_SDL_TEMPLATE=sdl/child.yaml bash ../spawn/scripts/deploy-akash.sh <CHILD_ID> — create → bid
     → lease → manifest (the existing, tested, registry-live deploy path — now pointed at the
     image-independent template instead of its broken default)

You (the calling agent) choose whether to actually run steps 1-4, in what order, and whether to gate each
one on its own success — this script's job ends at telling you the truth about AKT balance vs cost.

Files

• run.sh — the gate (see above). Reads config.json, queries the chain read-only, delegates the
  actual arithmetic to lib/akt-cost-gate.js (pure, unit-tested), appends one ledger row, exits 0 always.
• config.json — spawn_cost_akt (default 25, mirrors akt-treasury.sh's TREASURY_MINT_UAKT default
  of 25,000,000 uakt, i.e. the AKT burned per ACT-mint top-up), buffer_akt (default 1, gas headroom for
  deployment create + lease create + send-manifest; cert publish is already done, see §20.1), plus the
  Akash key name/keyring backend and the documented funding route. Change these numbers here, not in code,
  if the real on-chain costs move.
• sdl/child.yaml — the image-independent boot SDL (public node:22-bookworm + command/args that
  clone this OSS repo and run the loop). Validated with provider-services sdl-to-manifest (parses to a
  real manifest — see Verify). ../spawn/scripts/deploy-akash.sh now accepts
  AKASH_SDL_TEMPLATE=<path> to use this file instead of its own inline (previously broken-image)
  fallback; passing nothing still works exactly as before, now with a fixed default image too.
• lib/akt-cost-gate.js + lib/__tests__/akt-cost-gate.test.js — the pure gate function and its
  boundary-case tests (node --test).
• scripts/test-spawn-child.sh — static + faithful-fake-provider-services behavioral oracle for
  run.sh (NOT-YET / READY / exact-threshold boundary / fail-closed), never touches real money.

Verify

• node --test lib/__tests__/*.test.js → all pass (arithmetic correctness, boundaries, invalid input).
• bash scripts/test-spawn-child.sh → static invariants (no tx/swap/mint/send calls anywhere in
  run.sh) + behavioral NOT-YET/READY/boundary/fail-closed against a fake provider-services.
• provider-services sdl-to-manifest <rendered sdl/child.yaml> → parses to a valid manifest.
• bash run.sh (real run, read-only) → prints the REAL current AKT balance and gate decision against
  the live anicca-akash wallet; appends to the durable ledger. Safe to run anytime — it can only read.

Fail-closed

Missing jq/node/provider-services, an unresolvable Akash key, or an unreachable node all exit
non-zero with a clear stderr message — never a fabricated balance or a fabricated "ready." A /tmp-rooted
ANICCA_STATE_DIR is refused for the same reason ../spawn refuses it: a lost ledger is a lost history
of the colony's funding trajectory.

Collision

This skill edits only skills/self/spawn-child/**. The two additive changes it required in ../spawn
(an AKASH_SDL_TEMPLATE override + a corrected RPC-endpoint selection in deploy-akash.sh and
akt-treasury.sh) are backward-compatible — default behavior when nothing is set stays the shape of the
existing "live" skill, just no longer silently broken (dead image, undialable RPC host).