Mind-Wander Skill

Autonomous background reasoning agent. Runs locally on Qwen3.5-9B, consumes zero

Anthropic tokens, and elevates findings to your context only when genuinely novel.

How it works

ON_YOUR_MIND.md  →  Qwen3.5 wander agent (every 30min)
  open questions       ↓ tools: query_graph, search_web,
  tangents             ↓         read_file, sandbox_run,
  hypotheses           ↓         check_dead_ends, record_dead_end, elevate()
                       ↓
              novelty gate (strict)
                  ↙         ↘
           MENTAL_EXPLORATION.md    DEAD_ENDS.md + wander graph
           (elevated findings)      (closed threads, never in your context)
                  ↓
           memwatchd detects write
                  ↓
           graph-rag memory (your context)

Prerequisites

• Qwen3.5-9B-Q8 pulled to Ollama: ollama pull qwen3.5-wander-q8 (or use install script)
• FalkorDB running (shared with graph-rag-memory skill if installed)
• Perplexity API key (optional but recommended for web search)
• graph-rag-memory skill installed (recommended — shares FalkorDB and Ollama)

Quick start

# Install and set up
bash mind-wander/scripts/install.sh

# Write your first open question
echo "## What is the best approach to X?" >> ON_YOUR_MIND.md

# Run manually
python3 mind-wander/run.py --verbose

# Check findings
cat MENTAL_EXPLORATION.md
cat DEAD_ENDS.md

# Status
python3 mind-wander/run.py --status

The ON_YOUR_MIND.md anchor file

Create ON_YOUR_MIND.md in your workspace root with questions and tangents.

The agent picks ONE per session. Format freely — the agent reads it as-is.

# On My Mind

## Open Questions
- Does X actually work better than Y in production?
- Is there a paper on Z that I haven't found yet?

## Tangents
- The implementation of A might connect to B in an interesting way

Mark completed items with ## ✅ COMPLETED so the agent skips them.

The novelty gate

• Restatement of known facts → discarded, nothing written
• New external finding intersecting open question → elevate()
• Empirical sandbox result that changes understanding → elevate()
• Definitively closed thread (≥2 targeted searches) → record_dead_end()

Tools available to the wander agent

Configuration

Edit mind-wander/mind_wander_config.py:

WANDER_MODEL    = "qwen3.5-wander-q8"   # or q4 for lighter
WANDER_OLLAMA   = "http://172.18.0.1:11436"
MAX_TOOL_CALLS  = 20
COOLDOWN_HOURS  = 3   # min hours before revisiting same anchor item

Output files

Research context

This skill produced the first novel finding in its 10-minute test run:

*"Cross-space routing (routing in nomic-space, retrieving in arctic/bge-m3 space)

matches same-space baseline accuracy — suggesting domain routing is robust to

embedding space discontinuities."* See NOVELTY_LOG.md for tracked findings.

See references/research.md for theoretical foundations and references/setup.md

for detailed installation instructions.