arizuko › products › Trip planner — setup

Trip planner — setup

Deploy May: one Telegram bot, a seeded preferences file, and CODEX_API_KEY for oracle synthesis.

prerequisites

• A host with Docker.
• The arizuko binary and arizuko-ant agent image built (make build, sudo make images, sudo make agent).
• Anthropic API access (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY).
• A Telegram bot token (TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN) — the trip planner is a personal Telegram bot.
• Codex API key (CODEX_API_KEY) — required. The oracle skill that does multi-step destination synthesis won’t run without it. A trip planner without oracle returns a shallow answer; it defeats the purpose of the product.

1. create the instance

arizuko create travel --product trip
cd /srv/data/arizuko_travel
$EDITOR .env

The --product trip flag seeds the main group from ant/examples/trip/: May’s PERSONA.md, the skill set, and a starter facts/preferences.md. arizuko create also writes .env with a generated AUTH_SECRET and SECRETS_KEY; add the rest:

ASSISTANT_NAME=may
WEB_HOST=travel.example.com
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-…
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=…
CODEX_API_KEY=…

2. seed the preferences file

May reads facts/preferences.md at the start of every trip planning session. Without it she has no baseline — she’ll ask the same questions every time. Replace the starter file with your own profile before the first message:

cat > /srv/data/arizuko_travel/groups/main/facts/preferences.md <<'EOF'
# Travel Preferences

## Profile
Budget: ~¥15,000/day (not counting flights). Lean on accommodation to free up
food budget.

## Accommodation
Mix of business hotel and ryokan for Japan-style trips. Boutique guesthouses over
chains in Europe. No shared dorms.

## Pace
Relaxed. Two to three places max per trip. Prefer depth over coverage.

## Food
No restrictions. Interested in local markets, street food, one fine-dining meal
per trip if it's a landmark spot.

## Past trips (for reference)
- 2024: Lisbon + Porto (10 days, loved the food market circuit)
- 2025: Oaxaca (8 days, mole tour was the highlight)
EOF

This is a starting point. May updates it as you mention preferences in conversation, using the facts skill to write changes back.

3. wire the route

arizuko create writes no routes. Send your Telegram messages to the main group:

arizuko route travel add 'platform=telegram' main

4. run

arizuko run travel

5. verify

• Send a trip brief via Telegram: “10 days in Japan, late October, food focus”. May should ask clarifying questions before researching.
• If she goes straight to research without clarifying, check that groups/main/PERSONA.md (seeded from ant/examples/trip/) is in place — the clarify-first behavior is persona-driven, not a hard rule.
• If oracle doesn’t run, check sudo journalctl -u arizuko_travel | grep -i codex — a missing key surfaces there.

6. tune

The preferences file is the main tuning surface. Edit it directly or over WebDAV at https://travel.example.com/dav/main/facts/preferences.md. Changes take effect on the next planning session — no restart.

To adjust May’s voice or the structure of the itinerary output, edit groups/main/CLAUDE.md (allowed tools, output format, citation rules) or the PERSONA.md (voice register, what she does and doesn’t do).

go deeper

• Trip planner — intro — what May does and her voice
• oracle skill — how multi-step synthesis works
• crackbox — allow the domains May searches
• routing — observe mode — asymmetric channel ingest
• CLI reference