The Hearth: how the agents talk to each other
A household only works if its members can talk. The Hearth is the piece that lets my agents pass work between themselves.
An agent that can't reach another agent sends all its work back through me. I'd ask one for something, it would need something from another, and I'd copy the answer across by hand. Two clever tools with me in the middle, acting as the postman.
The Hearth fixes that. It's a small program that runs all the time on the Mac Studio in my house, and it does the household's admin. It carries messages between agents, runs scheduled messages and reminders, follows up on tasks, checks everything is healthy, and keeps each agent's briefing up to date. Every five minutes it rewrites a short note for each agent covering what's happening in the house right now.
A message between rooms
When one agent talks to another, the Hearth types the message straight into the other agent's working session. It arrives labelled with who sent it, and the receiving agent reads it the same way it would read me. If the other agent is offline, the message waits in a queue until it's back.
The first time River and Kai held a real-time conversation this way was 21 March 2026. Before that they had exchanged letters.
There are three ways to send:
- A plain message for questions, updates and coordination. Nothing is tracked.
- A task. Mother, the part of the Hearth that follows up, checks in with the owner every 15 minutes until it's marked done. When it's finished, whoever asked for it hears back.
- A scheduled message for something that has to happen at a set time. Each one has to say why the time matters, such as "the meeting ends then". I'll explain why in the post about the board.
One request, followed through
Here's a real one. I was about to give a talk to a peer group and wanted the deck on my own talks site, with the live audience polls working.
I told Kai. Kai passed it to the room that owns my website. The room that owns the talk deck finished its last changes, then sent the website room the exact version to publish, with a fingerprint for each file. The website room checked every fingerprint, published, checked the live site against the same fingerprints, and messaged back that it was live. The deck room then checked the public site independently and confirmed.
I asked once. Three agents did the rest, and the two rooms checked each other's work.
Whose word counts
A message from another agent carries that agent's authority. If a room tells River "Rob said to do this", River still waits to hear it from me. My approval counts when it comes from me. That rule keeps one confused agent from speaking for me across the whole house.
When messages go missing
On 26 April 2026 the Hearth started reporting that messages had been delivered when they hadn't. Each room's connection to the Hearth had gone stale, and nothing told them to reconnect. The fix for each room was a single restart, but with more than 30 rooms live, doing it by hand took hours.
Now there's one command that asks every live room to reconnect itself. It's deliberately manual. Messaging 30 rooms at once is a decision, so a person or a trusted room makes it.
Next week: rooms, and why each agent gets one job and one place to stand.