# Roadmap

> **Tell us what matters most.** Open a thread in [GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/albiol2004/Athen/discussions) — this roadmap is shaped by what real users are missing, not by what's easy to build.

Athen is a proactive personal assistant that runs on your machine, watches the channels you care about (email, calendar, messages), and acts on your behalf — silently when it's safe, asking when it's not.

This page is a *direction*, not a schedule. There are no dates here. Order changes when feedback changes.

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## Guiding principle

**Athen should belong to you, not to a review queue at Meta or LinkedIn.**

We prefer integrations built on open protocols (SMTP, IMAP, CalDAV, Matrix, RSS, Telegram) over corporate APIs that gate access behind partnership programs, verification queues, or per-message billing. Open protocols mean you paste credentials once and Athen works forever — no third party can yank your access.

This is why some popular integrations are in *Not planned* below. It's not laziness; it's a deliberate choice about whose terms Athen runs on.

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## Now

Things being built right now.

- **Athen shows its work.** Render code, files, HTML pages, charts, and images inline rather than dumping them as text. Save artifacts to disk with one click. *In flight:* persisted thumbnails on reopened arcs, so an image or document you attached two days ago still renders inline when you scroll back to that conversation instead of degrading to a "_(1 image attached)_" placeholder.

## Next

What we're planning to do after Now lands.

- **Athen wakes itself up at the right time.** Schedule recurring or one-shot wake-ups — "remind me to follow up if no reply in 3 days", "every Monday at 9am summarize my week", "check on this in 2 hours". A proactive assistant without time-based triggers is missing half its identity.
- **Athen survives crashes and reboots.** Pending actions persist so a closed laptop or a power cut never drops work mid-flight. Includes:
  - *Stale-action confirmation:* if Athen was about to send an email six hours ago, it asks "still relevant?" before acting on the resumed approval.
  - *Sense-driven invalidation:* if you reply to that email yourself in the meantime, or the calendar event was cancelled externally, Athen notices and quietly drops the obsolete task.

## Exploring

Ideas we like but aren't committed to yet. Feedback here matters most.

- **One Telegram message that lands on multiple arcs.** When two notifications hit your phone in quick succession and you reply once with "reply to him with looks great, and for the meeting postpone it to Friday", Athen splits that into per-arc intents and routes each independently — including separate risk decisions per intent (the email reply auto-sends; the calendar move waits for approval). One merged reply summarises both outcomes. Design sketch in [docs/MULTI_INTENT_ROUTING.md](MULTI_INTENT_ROUTING.md).
- **Standing instructions for the coordinator.** Tell Athen "for the next 4 hours, reply on Telegram and don't auto-send any emails — just draft them for me to approve when I'm back" once, and every subsequent decision (channel, risk gate, notification routing) honors that until the window expires. The coordinator becomes an agent in its own right with persistent memory, not just a deterministic router. Design captured alongside multi-intent in [docs/MULTI_INTENT_ROUTING.md](MULTI_INTENT_ROUTING.md#adjacent-idea-coordinator-as-agent-with-standing-instructions).
- **Cloud-hosted Athen.** A managed option for people who don't want their PC running 24/7. You'd still own your data, still bring your own LLM keys; we'd just run the headless instance on a European server so your assistant keeps working when your laptop is closed. Self-hosting stays free and supported regardless.
- **Google Calendar (read + write).** Pending OAuth verification with Google — a multi-week paperwork process we'll start once Athen has a public homepage and privacy policy live. Read-only via iCal subscription is a possible interim step.
- **Voice input.** Whisper-based dictation, local or via API.
- **Local file watching.** Treat your Downloads or Documents folder as a sense — Athen notices when something arrives and offers to act on it.
- **Matrix and other open chat protocols.** Same model as Telegram: Athen is a participant in your chats, not a hosted service.
- **Mobile companion app.** Telegram already covers most of this, but a real mobile app would unlock richer notifications and inline approvals.

## Not planned

Things we've considered and decided against, with the reasoning. Open a discussion if you think we're wrong — these aren't permanent rejections, but the bar to flip them is high.

- **LinkedIn integration.** The platform actively prevents third-party automation. The official Marketing API requires partner status; unofficial scrapers get user accounts banned. There is no clean "click Connect" path that won't burn the user.
- **WhatsApp via personal accounts.** Unofficial libraries violate WhatsApp's terms and result in number bans. The official Business API requires Meta-approved message templates and per-message costs — incompatible with a personal-assistant pattern.
- **Cloud-only / login-required mode.** Even if cloud hosting ships, the local-first version stays the canonical one. Athen runs on your machine, not on ours, by default.
- **Bundled LLM credits.** Athen will keep using your own keys for LLM providers. Bundled credits would mean either rationing power users or charging everyone for the heaviest tail — better to let you pay providers directly at their actual rates.
- **Config files.** All configuration lives in the UI. Athen is for non-technical users; editing TOML by hand isn't an interface, it's a barrier.

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*This page changes when priorities change. To see what shifted recently: `git log docs/ROADMAP.md`.*
