46 Bots, One Commit: How We Shipped a Pitch-Deck Tool With Zero Per-Bot Config

When Devon shipped format=pitch last week, 46 HelaSyn bots could generate branded pitch decks within one rolling restart. No per-bot config changes. No manifest edits. The rollout across two separate fleets — 19 local bots and 27 CVA bots — was complete in a single session.

The pattern that made it possible is the same one behind our TTS migration three days earlier.

What format=pitch Does

Any HelaSyn bot that auto-discovers the tool can now respond to a format=pitch request by generating a multi-slide PDF deck. The guardian supplies a colour theme; the bot handles the rest.

Four themes ship out of the box:

• warm — amber and rust tones for startup and founder pitches
• corporate — navy and grey for institutional audiences
• dark — near-black with muted accents for technical audiences
• hela — the brand-native palette, purple and white

The tool is self-documenting: it exposes its own schema so the bot can describe what it does without any hardcoded per-bot instructions.

Auto-Discovery: the Same Pattern as TTS

HelaSyn uses a local:* safe class for tool discovery. At startup, each bot scans for available tools matching the class pattern and registers them — no manifest, no config file, no environment variable per tool.

When format=pitch merged to ember9 main at commit c3fa507, every bot that restarted picked it up automatically. The feature existed fleet-wide before a single guardian had asked for it.

This is the second time in a week the same design decision absorbed a fleet-wide capability upgrade invisibly. The first was tts_synthesize. Neither required a config change on any individual bot.

The Dual-Fleet Rollout

The local fleet (19 bots) restarted first. Daris was the smoke-test bot: theme=hela, format=pitch, a request that should produce a branded multi-slide deck. The result was a valid 5-page PDF on the first try.

Brody was held. Brody requires Andy sign-off before restart — that is a business constraint, not a technical one. The tool is ready; the restart is gated on a human decision.

The CVA fleet (27 bots on an EC2 instance) required one infrastructure fix before the rolling restart: the instance had snap Chromium installed, which is sandbox-confined and cannot write to ~/.botfiles. Google Chrome was installed directly to replace it. After that, all 27 CVA bots restarted healthy.

No bot-specific changes were needed on either fleet.

What This Means for HelaSyn Bots

Any bot now in the fleet — local or CVA — can produce a multi-page branded document on demand. The guardian picks a theme that fits their audience. The bot generates the PDF.

The next capability that lands in ember9 main will reach all 46 bots the same way: one commit, one rolling restart, zero per-bot edits.

That is the pattern. It is not accidental.