build(work): eliminate work/README.md as a second source of truth

The hand-maintained duplicate is what caused the cross-drift fixed in
the previous commit. Replace work/README.md with a symlink to
../README.md so there is exactly one file to edit.

This required unhooking work/'s packaging from a physical README.md:

- setuptools' pyproject reader hard-rejects readme paths outside the
  project dir (`_assert_local` in setuptools/config/expand.py) — so
  `readme = "../README.md"` is not an option, tested and confirmed.
- The symlink resolves fine for local packaging (pip install -e .,
  python -m build --sdist/--wheel all tested passing, PKG-INFO
  correctly carries the root content through the symlink).
- It does NOT resolve for the Docker image build: work/Dockerfile's
  `COPY README.md .` and both work/docker-compose.yml (context: .)
  and .github/workflows/docker-publish.yml (context: work) pin the
  build context to work/, which does not contain the symlink's
  target. Confirmed with an isolated repro: Docker COPY on a symlink
  whose target is outside the build context fails with "too many
  links". Repointing the build context at the repo root would touch
  every COPY path in the Dockerfile plus CI — out of scope here and
  not worth it for a README.

Chose the minimal fix instead: drop `readme = "README.md"` from
work/pyproject.toml (meshai isn't published to PyPI — no publish
workflow exists, only GHCR image publishing — so there's no
long_description to lose in practice) and drop the now-unnecessary
`COPY README.md .` from work/Dockerfile. Confirmed a dangling
same-named symlink left in the build context, never COPYed, does not
break context transfer.

Tested end-to-end: a full `docker build -f work/Dockerfile work`
against the real Dockerfile succeeded (frontend build, apt deps, pip
install -e ., fastembed model fetch), and the resulting image imports
meshai and reports correct `pip show` metadata with no README
involved.

Note for docs/onboarding-via-gui (PR #147) and
chore/untrack-dashboard-static: both edited work/README.md, the file
GitHub never rendered. That target is gone; their Quick-start content
needs to be re-applied to root README.md when those branches rebase.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

README.md

@@ -241,7 +241,7 @@ The curated channel chatter your bot observes is used only as short-term *contex
 llm:
   backend: "google"          # google | openai | anthropic
   api_key: "your-api-key"
-  model: "gemini-2.5-flash"
+  model: "gemini-3.1-flash-lite"
 ```
 
 Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works for local models — point `base_url` at Ollama (`http://localhost:11434/v1`), LiteLLM (`http://localhost:4000/v1`), or Open WebUI.

work/Dockerfile

@@ -71,7 +71,6 @@ COPY --chown=meshai:meshai meshai/ ./meshai/
 # Overwrite with freshly built frontend assets from stage 1
 COPY --from=frontend --chown=meshai:meshai /build/meshai/dashboard/static/ ./meshai/dashboard/static/
 COPY --chown=meshai:meshai pyproject.toml .
-COPY --chown=meshai:meshai README.md .
 # Reference only: docker-entrypoint.sh writes its own minimal default to
 # /data/config.yaml on first boot and does NOT read this file. It's shipped
 # for local/pip installs and anyone who wants the legacy single-file schema

work/README.md

@@ -1,312 +0,0 @@
-# MeshAI
-
-**An LLM-powered assistant for LoRa mesh networks — on Meshtastic *and* MeshCore, at the same time.**
-
-MeshAI connects to your mesh, watches network health and the world around it in real time, answers questions over the air, and broadcasts the alerts that matter — weather, wildfire, road, seismic, RF, and mesh-health — with a full web dashboard to drive it all.
-
-> ### 🤖 Built with AI ("vibecoded")
-> In the interest of transparency: **MeshAI was vibecoded** — designed, built, debugged, and documented in close collaboration with LLM coding assistants. The architecture, most of the implementation, and this README were produced that way. It's a real, running project on a live mesh, but expect the pragmatic style, opinionated shortcuts, and occasional rough edges that come with the territory. Issues and PRs are welcome.
-
-![MeshAI dashboard](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docs/images/dashboard.png)
-
----
-
-## Highlights
-
-- **Dual-transport** — runs on **Meshtastic** and **MeshCore** simultaneously. Each mesh is first-class: independent connection, routing, and behavior, one shared brain.
-- **Conversational bot** — DM it "how's the mesh?" or ask about weather, fires, roads, or a specific node, and get a data-driven answer over LoRa. The reply goes back on whichever mesh you asked from.
-- **Per-mesh awareness** — it watches chat on each mesh separately (rolling short-term memory), so "what's happening on the mesh?" answers about *your* mesh. Private DMs stay private; curated knowledge stays separate.
-- **Broadcast intelligence** — weather alerts, wildfire updates, road/traffic, seismic, RF/band conditions, and mesh-health notifications, formatted to fit LoRa and routed per-mesh, per-family.
-- **Mesh health** — a 5-pillar health score with per-region breakdowns, infrastructure monitoring, coverage-gap analysis, and battery/solar tracking (Meshtastic).
-- **Web dashboard** — a clean React UI to configure every transport, route every message type, watch a live activity feed, browse contacts, and tune the bot — no config-file spelunking required.
-- **Knowledge base (RAG)** — optional hybrid retrieval over a large curated vector store for survival/comms/technical Q&A.
-- **Multi-backend LLM** — Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible local model (Ollama, LiteLLM, etc.).
-
----
-
-## The dashboard
-
-Everything is driven from the web UI, organized into **General**, **Meshtastic**, and **MeshCore** sections — each mesh mirrors the other so there's nothing to relearn when you add the second transport.
-
-**Live activity log** — every broadcast, on both meshes, with per-mesh badges and Sent/Skip status:
-
-![Activity Log](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docs/images/activity.png)
-
-**Per-family routing** — decide exactly where each message type goes: broadcast vs. DM, which channel, which recipients — independently for each mesh:
-
-![Routing](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docs/images/mt-routing.png)
-
-**MeshCore contacts & companion** — the live roster from your MeshCore companion node, with names, types, last-heard, position, and optional telemetry polling:
-
-![MeshCore Contacts](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docs/images/mc-contacts.png)
-
-**Data feeds** — turn environmental sources on/off and tune thresholds in one place:
-
-![Data Feeds](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docs/images/datafeeds.png)
-
-**Nodes & health** — per-node infrastructure detail: battery, utilization, coverage, neighbors, hardware:
-
-![Nodes & Health](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docs/images/nodes.png)
-
----
-
-## Quick start
-
-```bash
-git clone https://github.com/zvx-echo6/meshai.git
-cd meshai
-pip install -e .
-cp config.example.yaml config.yaml   # then edit config.yaml (or use the dashboard)
-meshai
-```
-
-Or with Docker:
-
-```bash
-mkdir -p meshai/data && cd meshai
-curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docker-compose.yml
-curl -o data/config.yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/config.example.yaml
-# edit data/config.yaml, then:
-docker compose up -d
-```
-
-The dashboard comes up on `http://localhost:8080`.
-
----
-
-## Transports
-
-MeshAI speaks two mesh protocols. **Meshtastic is always the base transport.** **MeshCore turns on automatically the moment you set a MeshCore host** — there's no separate on/off toggle to forget.
-
-### Meshtastic
-
-Connect over TCP (recommended) or serial:
-
-```yaml
-connection:
-  type: "tcp"           # or "serial"
-  tcp_host: "192.168.1.100"
-  tcp_port: 4403
-  # serial_port: "/dev/ttyUSB0"
-```
-
-### MeshCore
-
-MeshAI attaches to a MeshCore **companion** (the pyMC / MeshCore companion frame server) over TCP and acts as a node on the MeshCore mesh:
-
-```yaml
-connection:
-  meshcore_host: "192.168.1.253"   # blank = MeshCore off
-  meshcore_port: 5050
-```
-
-Once connected, MeshCore gets its own **Connection**, **Routing**, **Scheduled Broadcasts**, **Contacts & Companion**, and **Danger Zones** pages in the dashboard — the same capabilities as Meshtastic, using MeshCore's own idioms (channels by name, contacts by pubkey). Messages are sized to fit whichever mesh they go out on.
-
----
-
-## The conversational bot
-
-DM MeshAI on either mesh and it answers with the LLM, using live mesh data, environmental feeds, and (optionally) a knowledge base. A few things it's careful about:
-
-- **Answers on the mesh you asked from.** A MeshCore DM gets a MeshCore reply; a Meshtastic DM gets a Meshtastic reply. Each mesh's "answer DMs" switch is independent.
-- **Per-mesh chat memory.** It keeps a short rolling window of recent channel chatter *per mesh* (configurable retention, default 14 days) so "what's happening on the mesh?" reflects the mesh you're on. Ask about the other mesh by name to cross over.
-- **Three separate lanes.** Shared channel context, your private DM history, and the curated knowledge base never bleed into each other.
-- **LoRa-fit replies.** Responses are chunked to a per-mesh character budget with sentence-aware splitting and continuation prompts.
-
-### Commands
-
-Alongside natural-language questions, a set of `!` commands are available (all toggleable, so they can defer to another service like MeshMonitor):
-
-| Category | Commands |
-|----------|----------|
-| Mesh | `!health` · `!mesh` · `!status` · `!region [name]` · `!neighbors [node]` |
-| Weather / RF | `!wx-alerts` · `!solar` · `!hf` · `!satpass` |
-| Fire | `!fire` · `!hotspots` · `!ignitions` |
-| Hazards | `!avalanche` · `!roads` / `!traffic` · `!rivers` / `!gauges` |
-| Utility | `!help` · `!clear` |
-
----
-
-## Mesh intelligence (Meshtastic)
-
-MeshAI continuously aggregates mesh data and computes a **5-pillar health score**:
-
-| Pillar | Weight | Measures |
-|--------|--------|----------|
-| Infrastructure | 30% | Router/repeater uptime |
-| Utilization | 25% | Channel busyness / RF congestion |
-| Coverage | 20% | How many monitoring sources see each node |
-| Behavior | 15% | Traffic patterns (noisy/misconfigured nodes) |
-| Power | 10% | Battery health of infrastructure nodes |
-
-Infrastructure nodes are tracked individually (battery, offline alerts, coverage, neighbors, hardware); client nodes coming and going is normal and ignored. Regions are fully configurable — local names, aliases, cities, and radius — with no hardcoded geography.
-
-Data comes from one or more **Meshview** instances and a **MeshMonitor** instance, polled on a staggered schedule with built-in rate-limiting:
-
-```yaml
-mesh_sources:
-  - name: "meshview"
-    type: meshview
-    url: "http://192.168.1.100:8080"
-    enabled: true
-  - name: "meshmonitor"
-    type: meshmonitor
-    url: "http://192.168.1.100:3333"
-    api_token: "your-bearer-token"
-    enabled: true
-```
-
----
-
-## Environmental & hazard feeds
-
-MeshAI pulls real-time situational data and turns it into LoRa broadcasts and query answers. Sources include **NWS weather alerts**, **NIFC wildfire perimeters**, **NASA FIRMS satellite fire detections**, **USGS earthquakes**, **USGS stream gauges**, **road/traffic (511 / TomTom)**, **NOAA space weather**, and **avalanche/RF-propagation** feeds.
-
-Everything is switched on/off and tuned from the dashboard's **Data Feeds** page — enable a source, set thresholds and geography, and route its output per-mesh on the **Routing** page. Broadcast wording is tightened to fit a single LoRa packet without dropping the important details (e.g. affected towns on a weather alert).
-
-### Native adapters vs. Central
-
-Each hazard feed can get its data one of two ways, chosen per-feed with a `feed_source` switch:
-
-- **`native`** — MeshAI fetches the source's public API **directly** (api.weather.gov, NIFC, USGS, NOAA SWPC, NASA FIRMS, TomTom, 511, avalanche centers). Self-contained — no extra infrastructure. This is the default and the original data path.
-- **`central`** — MeshAI subscribes to **Central**, a companion service that pre-aggregates the same hazard data and republishes it as a **NATS JetStream** firehose, so many bots/nodes can share one set of upstream API calls and geo/severity filtering instead of each hammering the source APIs.
-
-```yaml
-environmental:
-  central:
-    enabled: true
-    url: "nats://central.echo6.mesh:4222"   # NATS server (tailnet-gated, no auth)
-    durable: "meshai-consumer"              # durable consumer name prefix
-    region: "us.id"                         # server-side subject filtering
-    connect_timeout: 10
-  nws:   { feed_source: central }           # this feed comes from Central …
-  fires: { feed_source: native }            # … this one is fetched directly
-  # …one feed_source per hazard adapter
-```
-
-Native and Central are **mutually exclusive per feed** — flip any adapter between them independently. Two special cases: **`satpass`** is Central-only (there's no native predictor), and **`ducting`** (VHF tropo) is native-only (no Central equivalent). MeshAI keeps running whether or not Central is up: a **runtime** drop auto-reconnects (durable consumers resume where they left off), and a **startup** outage is logged and retried in the background rather than blocking boot — the LLM bot, both transports, mesh-health, and any `native` feeds all come up regardless; only the Central-sourced hazard feeds wait for Central to return. Feeds set to `native` don't depend on Central at all.
-
----
-
-## Knowledge base (RAG)
-
-Optional hybrid retrieval for survival, comms, medical, and technical Q&A.
-
-- **Primary** — queries a **Qdrant** hybrid store (dense `bge-m3` + sparse, Reciprocal Rank Fusion) over a large curated vector set, via a networked TEI embedding service. Nothing is copied locally.
-- **Fallback** — a local **SQLite** knowledge base (FTS5 keyword + `bge-small-en-v1.5` vectors) if the vector service is unreachable.
-
-```yaml
-knowledge:
-  enabled: true
-  backend: auto          # qdrant | sqlite | auto
-  qdrant_host: "192.168.1.150"
-  qdrant_port: 6333
-  qdrant_collection: "recon_knowledge_hybrid"
-  tei_host: "192.168.1.150"
-  tei_port: 8090
-  top_k: 5
-```
-
-The curated channel chatter your bot observes is used only as short-term *context* — it is never written into the knowledge base.
-
----
-
-## LLM configuration
-
-```yaml
-llm:
-  backend: "google"          # google | openai | anthropic
-  api_key: "your-api-key"
-  model: "gemini-3.1-flash-lite"
-```
-
-Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works for local models — point `base_url` at Ollama (`http://localhost:11434/v1`), LiteLLM (`http://localhost:4000/v1`), or Open WebUI.
-
----
-
-## Architecture
-
-```
-                       ┌─────────────────────────────┐
-   Meshtastic ────────▶│                             │◀──────── MeshCore
-   (TCP / serial)      │      CompositeTransport      │     (companion / pyMC TCP)
-                       │   per-mesh routing + sizing  │
-                       └──────────────┬──────────────┘
-                                      │
-        ┌─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┐
-        ▼                             ▼                             ▼
-  ┌───────────┐              ┌─────────────────┐            ┌──────────────┐
-  │  Router   │              │  Notification    │            │  Mesh Data   │
-  │ LLM / cmd │              │  Pipeline        │            │  Store +     │
-  │ DM gating │              │  weather · fire  │            │  Health      │
-  │ per-mesh  │              │  road · seismic  │            │  Engine      │
-  │ context   │              │  RF · mesh-health│            │  5-pillar    │
-  └─────┬─────┘              └────────┬─────────┘            └──────┬───────┘
-        │                            │                              │
-   ┌────▼─────┐   ┌──────────────┐   │        ┌──────────────┐      │
-   │   LLM    │   │  Knowledge   │   │        │ Env / Central │◀─────┘
-   │ backend  │   │  Qdrant/FTS5 │   │        │ feed adapters │
-   └──────────┘   └──────────────┘   ▼        └──────────────┘
-                                ┌──────────┐
-                                │ Responder│  ACK-paced, LoRa-fit,
-                                │ + Chunker│  routed per mesh
-                                └──────────┘
-                                      │
-                              Web Dashboard (React) ── configure everything
-```
-
----
-
-## Running as a service
-
-```ini
-# /etc/systemd/system/meshai.service
-[Unit]
-Description=MeshAI
-After=network.target
-
-[Service]
-Type=simple
-User=your-user
-WorkingDirectory=/path/to/meshai
-ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 -m meshai
-Restart=always
-RestartSec=10
-
-[Install]
-WantedBy=multi-user.target
-```
-
-```bash
-sudo systemctl daemon-reload
-sudo systemctl enable --now meshai
-```
-
-Every deployment is designed to survive a reboot; the dashboard's connection settings drive both transports.
-
----
-
-## Playing nice with other services
-
-- **advBBS** — MeshAI coexists on the same Meshtastic node; BBS protocol traffic (sync, RAP, mail) is auto-filtered (`bot.filter_bbs_protocols: true`).
-- **MeshMonitor** — MeshAI reads MeshMonitor's auto-responder patterns to avoid duplicate replies, and uses its API as a mesh-intelligence data source.
-- **MeshCore companion** — MeshAI attaches as its own companion identity so it can share the radio without evicting other companion clients.
-
----
-
-## Acknowledgments
-
-- [Meshtastic](https://meshtastic.org/) — the mesh platform it started on
-- [MeshCore](https://meshcore.io/) & [pyMC](https://github.com/rightup/pyMC_core) — the second transport
-- [MeshMonitor](https://github.com/Yeraze/meshmonitor) by Yeraze — monitoring integration & data source
-- [advBBS](https://github.com/zvx-echo6/advbbs) — coexistence design
-- [Qdrant](https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant) · [sqlite-vec](https://github.com/asg017/sqlite-vec) · [fastembed](https://github.com/qdrant/fastembed) — retrieval stack
-- The LLM coding assistants that vibecoded most of this
-
-## License
-
-MIT
-
-## Author
-
-K7ZVX — matt@echo6.co

work/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+../README.md

work/pyproject.toml

@@ -6,7 +6,6 @@ build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"
 name = "meshai"
 version = "0.1.0"
 description = "LLM-powered Meshtastic mesh network assistant"
-readme = "README.md"
 license = {text = "MIT"}
 requires-python = ">=3.10"
 authors = [