Powers

What a Power is

A Power is a named capability with a typed input, rather than an invisible shared shell. Reading your calendar is a Power. Sending mail is a Power. Searching for a used car within a budget is a Power. Because each one is named, Ghillie can grant a task exactly the Powers it needs and nothing else.

Powers group into families with sub-powers. A family switch controls every active sub-power at once; individual switches live in the family's Sub-powers tab. A disabled Power stays visible in the catalogue but cannot receive a new lease or run an already-approved call.

What ships in the box

Ghillie registers named read tools for:

• Shared memory recall
• Task and project reads
• Gmail and Microsoft mail
• Microsoft calendar
• Contacts search and inspection
• OneDrive
• The WhatsApp mirror
• Proactive proposals, their context and logs
• Overnight autopilot status
• Health of the helper processes and syncs it depends on

Effectful Powers, such as the used-car search that spends against an API budget, sit behind exact-query approval and strict filters.

Leases

Nothing runs a tool directly. When a task needs a Power, Ghillie issues it a short-lived capability lease. The lease names the allowed tools, the workspace scope, an expiry, a call budget and the approval policy that applies. Every call is checked against the lease and recorded in the hash-linked audit trail. A model cannot ask for a wider lease than the task was granted.

Teaching Ghillie a new Power

You can draft new Powers in conversation from the Powers screen. Describe what you want handled; Ghillie grounds the draft against the tools it already has, checks the source, test input and permissions, and hands back an unsaved draft for you to read.

1. Draft and refine in plain English. Each revision is checkpointed.
2. Test in isolation. Read-only tests run immediately. Anything consequential shows its exact effect plan and waits for approval first.
3. Promote. Only a revision whose current test passed can become an active, immutable Power version.

Every bundled tool can also be installed as an editable, versioned Power of your own, without duplicating anything a custom Power already covers:

pnpm --filter @ghillie/core install:bundled-powers -- --dry-run
pnpm --filter @ghillie/core install:bundled-powers

Chaining Powers

For a bigger job, Ghillie can select one exact Power or a small dependency graph of two to six steps. Each step records the Power version and arguments it used. A later step can reference a completed earlier step's structured result; Ghillie requires the dependency to be declared, resolves only completed output, and audits the source, the path taken through it and a hash of the value. Safe steps run in order under scoped leases; write, external and destructive steps pause for approval with their resolved arguments visible.

Health

The Powers screen shows the latest real execution for every tool. Turning a Power on does not count as a successful check; a changed Power needs a fresh run, and evidence older than 24 hours needs a retest. Approval previews and declined approvals never count as passes. A Gmail token that has expired shows a reconnect action.