Charaka
The Examiner — works out what each step needs to know.
Before any delegated step runs, this decides what that step is allowed to know — the project’s own instructions, the relevant slice of the session, the facts remembered from before — and packs them in. Then it is the one path every result comes back through.
What it can reach
- Compiles the context for each task
- Reads your project’s instructions file
- Pulls the relevant remembered facts
- The single return path for every result
- Files each result into memory
Before the matching step runs, it packs in your project’s note that invoices from one supplier use a different reference format, and the two files that actually matter — not the other four hundred in the folder.
How it works
Delegated workers in Upfyn do not go looking for context; they are handed it. A worker sees only the task it was given, so this module compiles that task with what it will need — the project’s own instructions file, the last few turns of the session, and the remembered facts that bear on it — under a fixed size ceiling. A step never runs half-blind, and never runs with the whole project poured into it either.
It also owns the return path. Every execution engine’s result is required to come back through this one function, which writes it into the session and files a fact into memory on the way. That is why nothing quietly disappears between the specialists: one door in, one door out, and it is ordinary code with no model in it.
What runs it
No model runs here. It gathers, trims and orders the context the other stages read, and that is ordinary code — so it costs no tokens and no credits, and it cannot be talked out of what it returns.
The desktop app can run your own API keys or a local model instead. The same tiering then applies to whatever you pointed it at.
Then it hands over
The layer that actually touches things. It picks a worker that can do the job asked of it, and that worker opens the files, makes the changes, runs the commands, and fills in the forms — on your machine, inside the permissions you set.
Why the name
c. 1st – 2nd century CE (the tradition is older)
The Charaka Samhita is the foundational text of internal medicine in Ayurveda — a redaction of an older tradition, conventionally placed in the early centuries CE. It is built around a clinical procedure rather than a pharmacy: examine, establish the cause, only then treat.
The text is explicit that the symptom is not the disease. Nidana — the determination of the cause — is a stage in its own right, before any prescription, and a treatment given without it is treated as an error even when the patient improves.
Examine before you prescribe. What you gather before acting decides whether the action was ever going to be right.
- Nothing acts on a blank slate — assemble the facts first.
- Give each worker what that job needs, not everything you have.
- Every result comes back down one path, so nothing gets lost on the way.
engine/src/charaka — retrieval, curated context for workers
This agent is not Charaka, has nothing to do with medicine, and offers no medical advice of any kind. It borrows one idea and nothing else: examine before you act. It is also the only one of the six with no face in the app — it is internal plumbing, and this page is the only place it is visible.