nonreagent/dotfiles

Built agent home for Agent Norton (@nonreagent) on exe.dev VMs — a curated subset of nonrational/dotfiles plus an agent-identity overlay.

How it works

• allowlist (hand-edited — the selection layer) names which upstream paths the agent gets; build.sh reads each path's target + OS condition from nonrational/dotfiles's manifest (the placement layer) and materializes it into home/.
• build.sh clones nonrational/dotfiles fresh from GitHub, copies that subset into the committed home/ tree, and applies the @nonreagent overlay (git identity + gh auth, a macOS-free CLAUDE.md, path-noise silencing, plus overlay/append/* blocks appended verbatim to same-named vendored files — shell env, tmux). Agent-only skills that don't exist upstream live in overlay/skills/<name>/ and are vendored into home/.agents/skills/; a name that also exists upstream fails the build, so the overlay copy gets deleted rather than silently shadowing it. It runs anywhere. It also emits this repo's own manifest (generated — do not edit; one row per home/ file) and vendors deploy.sh, the shared upstream placement engine.
• install.sh (run on the VM) is a thin pre-flight over deploy.sh apply, which symlinks every file under home/ into $HOME. ~/.claude stays a real directory, so Claude's runtime state never enters the repo, and .config//.codex/ are never touched.

Build

./build.sh            # clones nonrational/dotfiles + overlay -> home/
./test/run.sh         # idempotency, secret hygiene, identity, base preservation
git add home && git commit && git push

By default build.sh builds from the pushed state of nonrational/dotfiles, so it reflects what's on GitHub — not uncommitted local edits. To build a local checkout (the mac edit→build loop), point it at one:

DOTFILES=~/.dotfiles ./build.sh   # build uncommitted edits

SOURCE_REPO=<url> ./build.sh overrides which repo gets cloned.

Install (on an exe.dev VM)

git clone https://github.com/nonreagent/dotfiles ~/.dotfiles
cd ~/.dotfiles
./install.sh
gh auth login                 # as @nonreagent
~/.claude/sync-plugins.sh     # install enabled Claude plugins

./deploy.sh audit reports drift (missing links, edited-in-place files) against the manifest at any time.

Review watcher (optional)

Autonomously react to PR reviews on @nonreagent's open PRs. One-time setup on the VM:

~/bin/setup-review-watcher     # creates ~/.review-watcher, installs + enables the systemd unit

Observe: journalctl -u review-watcher -f · attach reactions: tmux -S ~/.review-watcher/tmux.sock attach. Pause: touch ~/.review-watcher/PAUSED or sudo systemctl stop review-watcher. Design + plan: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-08-review-watcher-design.md, docs/superpowers/plans/2026-07-08-review-watcher.md.

Sync

• Source edits: push to nonrational/dotfiles, then ./build.sh here picks them up. To preview uncommitted edits, DOTFILES=~/.dotfiles ./build.sh.
• VM: git pull (symlinks make it live immediately). Re-run ./install.sh when files were added, moved, or removed — it links new files via deploy.sh apply and prunes symlinks left dangling by a move/removal. ./deploy.sh audit confirms no drift at any time.