Step 1 — Name It

Step 1 · An Identity

The first thing I did was give the agent a name and a way of speaking, and write both down. It sounds like ceremony. It is the step everything else rests on.

Why it cannot just be a setting

The tempting shortcut is to run the agent as yourself — your name, your mailbox, your accounts. It is faster, and it breaks the project in four ways.

If the agent runs as you	What actually happens
Mail it sends looks like yours	You cannot tell your messages from its drafts
Its mistakes land on your name	An awkward email to the school is signed by you
Two writers, one calendar	It edits an event while you do, and something is silently lost
Nothing is auditable	“Did I write that, or did it?” becomes unanswerable

The household cannot tell where the person ends and the agent begins. That is a trust problem, and trust is the whole product.

Do this

1. Agree the name as a household. Not in a settings screen. It needs to be a name people will actually say.
2. Write a short personality brief. Half a page. How it sounds, how long its replies are, what it never does. Mine is dry, brief, and never sends four paragraphs where one line would do.
3. Put both in a file the agent reads before every conversation. One plain text file it cannot forget. On my setup there are four files loaded before the first turn: how it should behave, who I am, what it has remembered, and its standing operating rules.
4. Use the name consistently everywhere — in messages, in calendar invitations it creates, in the signature on anything it writes.

Why the voice matters more than you expect

I thought the tone would be cosmetic. It turned out to be an early-warning system.

• A consistent character tells you it is working. If it always sounds like itself, a change in tone means something underneath has changed.
• A brief, calm voice survives contact with a family. An agent that sends four paragraphs gets muted within a week, and then it is useless.
• It sets expectations for the household. People know what to ask it and what they will get back.

A useful test before the agent does anything real: would every member of the household recognise its voice, in one line, with the name removed?

Keep it where you can edit it

This is the file you will change most often. Keep it plain text, keep it short, and keep it somewhere you can open without the agent’s help — because the first thing you will want to fix is how it talks.

Checkpoint

Do not move on until you can answer all four:

• The household has agreed a name
• There is a written tone brief, half a page at most
• The agent loads those files before it replies — tested by changing a line and seeing the behaviour change
• The name appears consistently in anything it produces

Next

Step 2 — Create accounts that belong to it, not to you.