How puduhepa uses Claude

puduhepa is built around the Claude CLI — not the Anthropic API. The whole stack runs on a single Claude Max subscription that the user authenticates once with claude setup-token. No API keys, no per-token billing, no rate-meter math.

What runs where

┌─ Telegram ────┐    ┌─ Bot (Go) ───┐    ┌─ Mayor (tmux + claude) ─┐
│ messages in   │ ─► │ ack instantly│ ─► │ persistent session,     │
│ photos / docs │    │ ship to inbox│    │ reads vault, tools:     │
│ /commands     │ ◄─ │ poll outbox  │ ◄─ │   Edit/Read/Bash/MCP    │
└───────────────┘    └──────────────┘    └─────────────────────────┘
                            │                       │
                            └──┬────────────────────┘
                               ▼
                        ┌─ Vault (git) ──┐
                        │ markdown +     │
                        │ media, auto-   │
                        │ committed,     │
                        │ pushed to      │
                        │ GitHub         │
                        └────────────────┘

The Go bot is intentionally dumb: it relays Telegram messages into mayor's inbox via gastown's gt mail plus a nudge, and mirrors mayor's replies back out. All reasoning, file edits, and tool use happen inside the long-lived claude session running under tmux.

Why a long-lived session

Per-turn claude -p "..." invocations exist (the bot uses them for a few admin commands), but the main conversation lives in a single mayor session that never restarts unless something crashes. That's how context survives across days — when you ask "what did I tell you yesterday about X?", mayor still has yesterday in its working memory. When context does eventually compact, the vault is the canonical backup: the bot writes every inbound + outbound message to telegram/history/YYYY-MM-DD.md so mayor can grep history when needed.

Persona

Mayor's behavior is shaped by persona.md in the puduhepa repo. The container injects it into mayor's project memory at boot, so every gastown agent sharing the town reads the same contract: brief replies, phone-first UX, vault writes only inside the designated rig, etc.

What's deliberately not here

• No Anthropic API client in the codebase. Search the source for anthropic or @anthropic-ai/sdk and you'll find none.
• No webhook to Anthropic's servers. Everything flows through the local claude binary which holds its own OAuth in /root/.claude/.
• No per-message cost tracking. The Max subscription is flat-rate.

Source

• Bot: erkantaylan/puduhepa
• Site: erkantaylan/puduhepa-site
• Persona contract: persona.md