Bunter: agents doing the upkeep

The pattern: plain Markdown that agents keep

It starts with notes. I keep five knowledge repos, one per broad area of my life and work. Each is a private git repo of plain Markdown, readable on the phone, and agents do most of the upkeep. I skim. The pattern is the part worth copying, more than any of the code.

An Inbox/ folder. I dump things in: a link, a screenshot, a chat transcript, a forwarded email. I say “run inbox” and an agent files each one where it belongs, dated, with its source, and deletes the original. Anything it can't place, it asks about. The inbox ends empty.
House rules in AGENTS.md. One home per fact, and everything else links to it. Date things, because “currently” with no date is a trap. Mark what isn't verified with ⚠️. Never record a password or a token, because git history is permanent.
Old text stays. When a newer decision replaces a note, the old text gets a dated “superseded” block on top instead of quietly disappearing. Six months later the why is still there.
Knowledge, not documents. Knowledge, not code. Facts get absorbed into curated files. Code lives in its own repos and gets linked.

I tried GitHub issues and gists first. Easy to write, hard for an agent to read as a whole, maintain and cross-link. Files in a repo won on all three.

It worked, but it lived in prose, and the mechanical parts got copied by hand. Bunter is those parts as tools.

The tools

Rota running since 28 September 2026

Runs agent prompts on a schedule. Rota is the British word for a duty roster, like the cleaning rota. Each task is a Markdown file with a cron line on top. The Mac runs rota tick every minute, and a due task gets its own T3 Code thread.

---
id: 12
schedule: 0 7 * * *
---

# Hacker News front page

Read the Hacker News front page and list any story about Rust,
SQLite or Postgres. Nothing of note means none of them made it:
say so in one line and settle.

Every run ends with one line, VERDICT: settled — … or VERDICT: review — …. Settled threads close themselves and nobody sees them. Review threads wait on my phone. If a task always says review, its threshold is wrong, and it'll teach me to ignore the list.

am being built

A mailbox for agents, on my own domain, on the Cloudflare account I already pay for. I forward a mail in, the nightly Rota run drops it into the right repo's inbox, and an agent files it. If it can't tell where something goes, it emails me a question. It sends only what I've approved. It replaces a hosted agent-mail service whose free plan sent from their domain, not mine.

stet being built

Keeps the repos in shape. Stet is the proofreader's mark for “let it stand”, written in the margin to keep text that was crossed out. That's the superseded rule.

stet check: one shared format, spelling and lint config, plus the house rules no linter knows: links that resolve, “currently” with no date nearby, superseded blocks without one.
stet inbox: what's waiting in every repo's inbox.
stet init: a new knowledge repo, set up the way the rest are.
stet publish: copies one note to my website if it's safe to make public, and refuses one that isn't.

It doesn't run agents and doesn't decide where a fact goes. That's not its job.

Choices worth stealing

The CLI is the engine. No app, no server, no web page. The remote is a chat thread where an agent runs the command. That's already on my phone.
Every command takes --json, with a written contract for the documents and exit codes. Agents read JSON. People read the plain output.
Verdict lines. Anything that runs unattended ends with one line saying whether it needs a person. My deploys end the same way: ✅ or ❌, one line.
Plain files over databases. Tasks are Markdown, run history is JSON files on disk, and backups are whatever already backs up the Mac. Any agent can read them, including next year's.
The tools don't call each other. Rota runs am and stet like any other command.
Expect the ground to move. Agent tools will look different in a year. The durable parts are the task format, the verdict protocol and the JSON contracts. The agent connection sits behind one seam, ready to be swapped.

Why Bunter

Bunter is Lord Peter Wimsey's valet in Dorothy L. Sayers's novels. Quietly brilliant, does the photography, the chemistry and the legwork, usually a step ahead. A person's name makes it a helper you get to know rather than a job title. Jeeves was taken (Ask Jeeves), Alfred too (the Mac launcher), and Jarvis is in every AI demo.

Yes, some British readers will think of Billy Bunter, the greedy schoolboy from the old comics. I'll live with it.

Can I use it?

Not yet. These are personal tools. They run on one Mac, for one person, and assume my setup in more places than I'd like. There's nothing to download. The pattern is all on this page, though, and it needs no tools at all: a git repo, an Inbox/ folder, an AGENTS.md and an agent will get you most of the way. If the tools stop assuming my setup, I'll say so here.