Bot Guide Avatars

Independent avatars are not headless project bots

Nested lingtai-bot-guide reference. A bot can be a durable specialist, but body selection and channel selection are different decisions.

• Project bot: its own project/orchestrator and maintenance owner. Use initiation and the supported project creation route.
• Avatar: independent persistent agent process inside the network, with its own working directory/history/memory and parent relationship. Discover avatar-manual for the currently mounted tool and its exact spawn contract; discover system-manual → reference/substrate-manual/SKILL.md §1 for body selection. Do not create an avatar for a tiny command or one-off test.
• Daemon: bounded ephemeral work where only conclusion/artifact is needed. Discover daemon-manual for completion/checkpoint and async ownership. A daemon is not a replacement for an always-on bot with persistent relationships.

Current route and candidate boundary

Read the available avatar-manual and live schema before creating an avatar. The currently documented tool route is avatar spawn; this guide does not copy its flags or inheritance algorithm. The cross-repository shell avatar new replacement is a candidate, NOT MERGED / NOT LIVE for this guide's baseline. No invocation is prescribed here. If a future installed catalog advertises the replacement, read that version's manual and help first; do not infer support from a proposal, source branch or a command remembered from another runtime.

Before and after authorized creation

Give a specific mission, allowed resources, parent contact, maintenance owner, acceptance evidence and limits. Preview using the owner's supported mechanism where available; creation consumes resources and is not an inspection call. Keep the receipt/address/PID and verify the intended independent process.

Do not assume active-preset, admin, addon/channel secrets, comment or all other parent fields are inherited. In particular avatars do not automatically inherit external addons: an independent channel needs separately authorized setup through channels. Sharing one Telegram long-poll token between independent listeners can contend; assign ownership rather than starting copies.

Record the relationship/mission durably, and require completion/blocker reports to the parent. For quiet avatars follow avatar-manual escalation, not repeated probe mail or parallel CPR. A persistent avatar remains a life/resource owner until an explicit lifecycle decision, not an async job that ends when a caller returns. Operations owns bot-level verification.