The agent you watch being built
Before, we filled in a form
In the tower, an agent is a worker. It receives a job, it does it, it returns a result. Chloé watches. Clark codes. Lois proofreads. Victor guards the door.
To create a new one, you had to fill in a sheet. Eleven boxes: its trade, its emblem, its title, where it comes from, what it does, what it refuses, its instructions, its examples, its brain.
We filled it in. We saved it. And we saw nothing.
A full sheet looks like an empty sheet. Both are a rectangle of text. You cannot look at a sheet and say: "something is missing".
So we turned it into a factory
The idea is simple: instead of filling boxes, you watch the agent move along a conveyor belt and build itself, station after station. Like a doll being assembled. Like Lego.
Six parts, six separate files. Each is built from three shapes only — cubes, cylinders, spheres. Each is built at its final position. We load them one by one, they land exactly right, without a single adjustment.
And every part carries a meaning:
The legs are its feet. The map of the tower, and the act of walking through it.
The pelvis is its base. Its trade, where it comes from.
The torso matters most. It carries what the agent does, and what it refuses. Those are the two jaws of its guardrail. The stone shining in the middle of the chest is its heart.
The two arms end in a hand. Each hand must hold a tool.
The head is its brain. It is plugged in last, once the body is assembled. That is not a staging trick: in an agent's real sheet, the brain genuinely is the last field on the list. All we did was show it.
And the belt revealed a hole
At the arms station, the agent holds out both hands.
And there is nothing to put in them.
The tower has two hundred and seventy-one tools. Programs that publish, that test, that measure, that tidy up. They are all listed on the map. You can read them, count them, search them by name.
Not one is attached to an agent. They all float apart. Nobody holds anything.
That is not an oversight in the drawing. It is a hole in the tower itself, and nobody had seen it, because a full sheet looks like an empty sheet.
The same hole exists elsewhere
There are thirty-two guardrails in the tower. Rules that refuse: do not publish a dated article, do not write a secret in the clear, do not touch production without a go-ahead.
They float too. Not one is placed on a specific door. We know they exist; we do not know where they guard.
That lesson does not come from us. It comes from a Cisco router. At Cisco, a filter never exists on its own: it is placed on an interface, in a direction. And you can ask the machine: show me every filter, and where it is placed.
That is exactly what we lack. A guardrail placed nowhere cannot be shown. A tool nobody holds serves nobody.
What we take from it
An empty station you can see does the same job as a door that refuses.
The belt codes nothing, repairs nothing, decides nothing. It shows. And what it shows can no longer be sidestepped: a link is missing between an agent and its tools, and another between a guardrail and the door it guards.
Two links. That is small. But until they exist, the tower has empty hands.
What comes next
Connect an agent to its tools. Then a guardrail to its door. Then put the agent back on the belt and watch its hands fill up.
When a hand really holds something, we will know: we will see it.
And now, a video game
Now that we have explored the network a little, we are diving — above all — into a video game. We hope Cisco makes something great.
And fairness demands it: Cisco has already started. The telepresence robot Ava, built with iRobot, lets a person be present in an office remotely. Their networks already drive robots around warehouses and factories. And their automation chief says generative AI will remake robotics.
We do not claim to do better. We watch what they do, and we learn.
Cisco is hiring, too.
As for us, we are diving into VR with a Quest headset on. We will see how it goes — we will send news from over there, I expect.
There is one idea we want to try: a system that lets the headset talk to reality. From inside the game, send a message that leaves the headset and arrives in the real world. That could be interesting.
And it already exists, in pieces. OSC already lets someone in VR trigger real things — lights, connected objects. MIT researchers have already opened a door between the headset and connected devices (VRLocal). And the Quest already knows how to send messages. We just want to do it our way, between our dungeon and the rest of the world.
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The voice in the video is made with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, and we say so.