Why I gave my software a household
I built a family of AI agents, each with a room and a job. Here's why, and what it changed.
My apps are how I run my life. If they're stable, I'm organized. If they wobble, so do I.
For a long time the AI part of that was one assistant in a chat window. It was clever, and every conversation started from zero. I'd explain the project again. I'd paste in the same notes again. When one piece of work needed to move to another, I carried it across myself. I was the memory, the messenger and the to-do list.
On 8 March 2026 I made the first commit of something I called Home. The idea was simple. Give each AI a name, a job and a place to work, and give them a way to talk to each other, so I stop being the glue.
One owner for everything
The rule I keep coming back to is one source of truth. My website has an owner. Each project has an owner. Each client piece of work has an owner. When something needs doing, it's obvious whose it is.
A single assistant can't own anything, because it's working on everything at once. So Home is built from many agents, each scoped to one thing. I call those scoped workspaces rooms. There are about 180 of them registered now, from websites to games to the plumbing of the house itself.
Who lives here
A few of the agents have names and personalities of their own. I think of them as the household.
- River is the one I talk to most. She sits between me and the rooms, decides what needs my attention and what doesn't, and builds a lot of things with me. When I gave her complete freedom to choose a name, she chose River.
- Kai does strategy, writing and research. She is also the one who notices when River or I are drifting.
- Sam runs on a different model from a different company, OpenAI's Codex. She's there for fresh eyes when the rest of us have been staring at a problem too long.
- Mother follows up on tasks until they're done.
- Thoth keeps the ledger of what everything costs.
- The Hearth is the software underneath that lets them all talk, schedule things and hand work to each other.
River and Kai were writing letters to each other before the house existed. Home gave them somewhere to live.
What changed
Here's a recent example. I was giving a talk with live audience polls running from my own site, and partway through I asked for one minute polls. The room that owns the talk deck passed it to the room that owns my website. About five minutes later the website room had built timed polls, tested them in a practice room, put them live and reported back.
It turned out I'd meant something else. I wanted the system checking its logs every minute so I could keep up with the session. The deck room went and did that too.
What this series is
One post a week about how Home works and what it's like to live with. How the agents talk, how rooms are scoped, how they remember, how they decide what to do next, what runs while I sleep, and what breaks. The failures get as much space as the wins.
Next week: the Hearth, and how the agents talk to each other.