i built an AI that
lives in my house.
senior business analyst by day. at night i run sparky — a local AI resident on a DGX Spark that grinds a task board while i sleep, remembers my family, speaks in my airpods, and answers to a written constitution.
sparky isn't a chatbot. it's a housemate with a job.
one memory, many roles, running entirely on hardware i can point at. not a saas subscription wearing my name — a resident that knows the house, earns trust, and leaves receipts. and when it wants something new, it proposes — i hold the pen.
◉memory soul
opens every conversation already knowing the house. idle chats get swept into memory nightly, and it writes a first-person journal of its day — every line inspectable, auditable, deletable.
▤the board
a kanban where autonomous workers claim tasks and grind. fire off work, walk away — the phone buzzes when it's done or stuck. sparky can even spawn its own helpers — one level deep, by design, with receipts.
🎙voice
its own voice (elevenlabs), ears that never leave the house (local whisper). airpods, apple watch, desktop — hold to talk, or just talk.
⬆the trust ladder
autonomy is earned, not defaulted. every action lands in one ledger, and permissions widen per-domain only when the record is clean. when it needs a yes, it asks on my lock screen — i answer from the watch.
⌂household aware
knows who's speaking. family members get their own roles and boundaries — my kid can chat with it; my kid cannot nuke the task board.
☉home senses
reads the house through home assistant — sensing first, always. control only ever arrives behind allowlists, policy, and audit.
i don't write most of the code.
i run the org that does.
sparky is built by a team of AIs with separated powers — and the separation is the whole trick. builders build. reviewers review. nobody holds both pens. i sit where a founder sits.
ben — the human
writes the wants, not the how. owns the taste, the product calls, and the standards. validates every slice against reality, not vibes.
fable — reads every diff
the standing seat: writes the specs, reads every diff, runs the tests, keeps an append-only decision log (80 entries and counting) — and drafted the constitution the others answer to. can reject. does reject.
codex — owns the iphone app
builds the phone + watch client end-to-end, and only talks to the platform through a written api contract. when the contract lies, it files a seam report — and gets a ruling, not a workaround.
the coders — hired per slice
disposable AI sessions, one bounded slice each, in isolated worktrees. tests green, review passed, then gone. no drive-by refactors, no scope creep.
one small gold box in kentucky.
everything runs on a DGX Spark — 128gb of unified memory humming on a shelf — reachable from my pocket over a private mesh. nothing leaves the house.
selected work — polished, weird, or somewhere in between.
how i actually build. not glamorous.
the idea spiral
get an idea, overthink it, hate it, come back to it, decide if it has pull.
write the want, not the how
a clear paragraph of intent beats a fake technical design from me every time. the spec is the product decision — the implementation is negotiable.
run the org
a builder agent ships one bounded slice. an architect agent reviews the actual diff. tests must pass, everything leaves a record, and i validate against the live system — not the report.
guard the speed
scope creep dies in review. stalled experiments get deleted, not absorbed. moving fast forever is the reward for staying clean.
talk weird AI builds with me.
questions, collaboration, or you're building your own resident and want to compare notes: