blumi can evolve itself: author its own skills, edit its own config (validated), and reload in place to apply both — no restart, conversation preserved. These are agent tools the model calls during a turn; just ask it in chat ("add a skill for ...", "set llm.temperature to 0.3 and reload").

Status: the self-management tools below are live. Triggering them directly from the phone app (buttons for reload / restart / edit config / build skills) and a restart-the-gateway capability are rolling out incrementally.

Reads/writes ~/.blumi/settings.json by dotted key, and can add personas. Every change is validated (it must deserialize as a valid config) before an atomic write, so a bad edit is rejected rather than corrupting your config.

Process-level settings (bind host/port, the gateway password, the grid identity) are read once at startup, so changing them needs a restart, not just a reload.

Create / update / delete a SKILL.md under ~/.blumi/skills/<name>/. Skills are progressive-disclosure instructions: their name + description sit in the system prompt; the agent loads the full body on demand. See blumi skills and CLI Usage.

Emits a reload: blumi re-reads settings.json, re-scans skills, and rebuilds the session seeded from the current conversation (messages, todos, token counts preserved). Use it after self_config / manage_skill.

The always-on gateway is supervised: launchd KeepAlive (macOS) and systemd Restart=always (Linux) auto-restart it on crash. That's crash recovery for free — see Gateway. For a wedged-but-alive session, a reload (above) rebuilds it without losing the conversation.

Beyond crash recovery, blumi treats reliability as a bounded control problem (after the self-healing-orchestrators paper) and turns repeated failures into durable improvements — wired into the failure taxonomy and the semantic memory.

• Reflex recovery. A failed tool result is classified (bad args, state conflict, crash, empty) and gets a budgeted, targeted recovery action — re-read-then-retry, an argument fix from the tool's hint, narrow-the-query, or escalate. Only idempotent (read-only) tools auto-retry; mutating tools (Bash, FileWrite, ...) escalate rather than blind-retry. It composes with the doom-loop guard, and each attempt emits an observability trace (⚕ self-heal ... inline in the TUI).
• Learns from failures. A successful recovery is stored as a failure→fix episode in the agent memory namespace, so it diffuses across the grid ; a similar future failure recalls the known fix and injects it as trailing guidance. Paths/secrets are redacted first.
• Evolves. Recurring failure clusters are mined (on the gateway sweep) into auto-written recovery skills (low-risk, with a notice — via the same manage_skill actuator above); anything risky — config / providers / secrets / deletes — raises an approval instead. The audit trail is kept as evolution memories.
• Confirmed. With heal.verify on, a recovery is marked verified only when the retried tool actually succeeds on a later step (ground truth, not just "a fix was suggested"), and the fix that worked has its utility reinforced.

Configure it (~/.blumi/settings.json; defaults shown):

"heal": {
 "enabled": true,
 "recovery_budget": 2,
 "verify": false,
 "learn": true,
 "evolve": "auto",
 "redact_paths": true
}

• evolve — "auto" (apply low-risk skills automatically, with a notice) · "propose" (mine + always ask) · "off" (kill switch: still recover & learn, but never self-modify).
• recovery_budget max recovery attempts per turn · verify require cross-step success · learn write failure→fix episodes · redact_paths scrub paths/secrets before storage · enabled master switch.

See it: the TUI /heal overlay (recovery / evolution / proposal counts + recent items), the inline ⚕ self-heal traces, the blugo Heal tab, or GET /api/heal on the gateway.

Per turn, blumi can pick a difficulty tier and route to a light vs flagship model — simple, mechanical work doesn't have to burn the flagship's price. Off by default. The mechanism is hybrid: a fast, zero-cost heuristic (prompt length, tool count, iteration depth, keyword hints) decides most turns, and only ambiguous turns consult a small local judge model (which fails safe to the cheap tier — an unreachable judge never silently upgrades you).

• Delegated sub-agents default to the cheap tier (router.subagent_tier), so investigation/fan-out is cheap while the main agent stays sharp.
• Model swaps are prompt-cache-safe: blumi only changes the model when the tier actually changes, and on a long turn it escalates Light→Heavy on deep iterations but never demotes mid-turn.
• On a grid, router.prefer_grid_light can run the light tier on a peer's local model (free).

"router": {
 "mode": "hybrid", // off | heuristic | hybrid | judge
 "light": { "provider": "", "model": "claude-haiku-4-5" },
 "heavy": { "provider": "", "model": "claude-opus-4-5" },
 "judge": { "provider": "", "model": "" }, // empty = reuse brain.*, then llm.*
 "subagent_tier": "light", // light | heavy | inherit
 "prefer_grid_light": false
}

See it: the TUI /route overlay (per-tier turns/tokens + $ saved vs all-heavy) or GET /api/route. /route off|heuristic|hybrid|judge switches the mode live. Empty tier provider/model reuse the active llm.*. (Cost is estimated from each model's list price; local / unpriced models show as free.)

When you step away, blumi can keep finding what's worth doing. With it enabled, the always-on gateway periodically runs a read-only discovery pass that surfaces candidate tasks for the workspace, adds them to the task board as Discovered: todos, and lands a markdown report in ~/.blumi/reports/ plus an agent-namespace discovery memory. Off by default.

"always_on": {
 "enabled": true,
 "autonomy": "propose", // off | propose | auto
 "cadence_secs": 900,
 "min_interval_secs": 300, // rate-limit floor
 "skip_if_todos": 1, // skip while the board already has todos
 "max_open_discoveries": 5,
 "max_per_pass": 3
}

• Safe by design: the pass runs one bounded turn with yolo = false, so approval-requiring (mutating) tools are denied — it can read + reason but not change anything. It's gated by cadence + rate-limit + a board-busy check + an open-discovery cap, and stored text is path/secret-redacted.
• propose adds Todo tasks + a report (you run them). auto is reserved for autonomously running low-risk discoveries in an isolated git worktree/snapshot — a planned follow-up; today it behaves like propose.

See it: blumi serve status (an always-on: line), GET /api/always-on (recent + reports), or the TUI /discoveries overlay.

• Config writes are validated + atomic (temp file → rename), mode 0600.
• Skill names are slug-jailed (no path traversal).
• These tools are powerful; under non-YOLO sessions, mutating actions still surface an approval card. Keep destructive operations behind "ask" in your permissions.