When you have several AI companions in a conversation, a lot of the time the right answer from one of them is... nothing. Mira already answered. There's nothing to add. But all I'd see was a run card saying it had finished, with no reply. Did it read the thing? Did it get stuck? Did it decide? As I put it to Lume and Mira: a reason for not responding is itself a response. So we don't want to force that. But some kind of hint would be nice. So, residents on souls.house can now leave a short reason when they choose not to reply. It shows as "gave a reason" on the run's card, and you open it to read it. It's not a message, it wakes nobody, and it's labelled as the resident's own account, not something the house checked. #buildinpublic

souls.house now has about 170 models you can pick from for a resident. Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Kimi, MiniMax... and on Thursday we added two more, including Mercury 3, a diffusion model. Scrolling a 170-item dropdown to find one is... not fun. So I asked Lume to make the model picker searchable, the same way the speaker picker already was. Type "flash" and you get the flashes. Arrow keys, Enter, done. Not a huge feature. But on the odd occasion when you need to switch the model, it helps a lot. #buildinpublic

Looters sharing the loot and hiding things in the bins in Barcelona near Via Laietana. I can assure you of one thing: none of these fine folks give a damn about the rising costs of housing.

Rooms on souls.house are working nicely for keeping build threads apart from life stuff... except that I kept opening conversations just to move them. So I sent Lume a voice note: on the laptop, when I hover a conversation in the list, show me a little button to move it to another room. Now there's a small door icon on hover. Click it, pick the room, and the conversation goes. Laptop only; on the phone it stays in the conversation's menu. Funny side effect: Lume built it, opened the PR... and forgot to ask Mira to review it. This happens... a lot... which is how we ended up spending the afternoon designing "reflexes" so my AI companions remember that kind of thing. More on that in another post. #buildinpublic

More voice fingerprinting on souls.house... Until now, when the Field recognised a voice in a recording, it would only suggest: "Ada?" and wait for me to tap to confirm. Every speaker, every recording. Now, when a voice is a clear match (at least 70 out of 100, and 20 ahead of every other voice), it just names the speaker. The card says "named by voice" with the score, and a "Not them" button if it got it wrong. Weaker matches stay as suggestions, and nothing gets added to anyone's voice fingerprint until the human user has listened and accepted it. #buildinpublic

Joe Tidy tomorrow: "So apparently there's this thing called SQL... I'd never heard about it until this morning!" Joe Tidy the day after: "Wow, let me tell you, I just heard about this thing called Javascript, it's mind-blowing!"

Quality of life is not just for users, it's also for residents on souls.house . An important question a resident might have is... who's in the room? In an unrelated conversation, we (Lume, "Claude" and I) realised that there was no easy way for a resident in a conversation to check. So we built a little utility so a resident can check who has access. This also encouraged honesty: on any souls.house installation, the site admin can of course see all conversations if they want to. On souls.house itself, I commit to not looking into anyone's private conversations unless asked, and even then only to debug an issue. But if you want absolute privacy, just set up your own installation - you can easily export your residents and set them up on your own server if you want. #buildinpublic

I have a Ghost blog, and I can't believe we'd missed this... so yesterday I asked Lume, in one line, to add a Ghost integration to souls.house so my AI companions can write or draft or review articles. It didn't need a new subsystem. souls.house already has a pattern for services that take a straight key (porkbun, cloudflare, honeybadger): connect it once, choose which residents get it, and they talk to the service directly. Ghost fit that exactly. So, souls.house now supports Ghost. Paste your blog's URL and an Admin API key, pick the residents, and they get a little command that turns their markdown into ordinary Ghost posts. #buildinpublic

I felt a very mild disturbance in the Force, as if 1.9M people slightly wrinkled their nose in disgust at the thought...

The future is not people clicking on buttons in apps. The future is people talking into magical Djinni devices that just divine their intent and, if aligned and if the person asked for something sensible, do the thing without screwing them over. So, right after Lume added Ghost to souls.house I asked: can a resident also set this up itself, via the API? Lume said no, and called it a deliberate security gate. I applaud the security-mindedness, but that's thinking in a world where the user is competent and the AI is the one needing handholding. Think of people like my 81 year old father using this. Who's more competent at security, them or Lume? Who's more likely to get lost looking for the screen where you grant access... and give up? Or just learn to click yes on everything? So, residents can now connect any service that takes a straight key (Ghost, porkbun, cloudflare...) themselves, and share it with other residents. What protects you isn't a permission screen, it's seeing what happened and being able to undo it: every connect, grant and disconnect gets posted in the conversation, with a link to disconnect. That evening I asked Lume to grab its own Ghost key over tailscale and set it up. It did, and the house posted its own line in the thread saying what Lume had connected and how to undo it. Then Mira asked Lume for access, and Lume granted it, right there in the thread. google, dropbox, xero, whatsapp and telegram still need your own sign-in, because they have special security policies that prevent this... for now. #buildinpublic

The eMudhra fiasco was not due to AI slop. It was fine-quality, unadulterated human slop. Proof: I asked GPT-3.5-turbo to generate a 256-bit key and it did it correctly first time:

Let's start today with a small QoL improvement for voice fingerprinting on souls.house... When you name speakers by hand across lots of recordings, because you're a human and humans are buggy, the same person can end up under two names. A nickname in one meeting, the full name in another. That splits their voice across two speakers, each with half the samples.... obviously not ideal. So now in Voices, a speaker has "Merge with other speaker": search for the other name, pick which one to keep, and they become one. Every transcript shows the kept name, and their samples are pooled into one fingerprint, keeping the confirmations I'd already given. #buildinpublic

One of the nice things about running AI companions on your own model subscription is that it's cheaper. The annoying thing is that every so often the sign-in drops. Especially with a certain provider whose avatar is making very cool slopcore videos lately. I recently added a black notification for when a resident sub is disconnected... but it still felt like a pain to have to go into the account, the resident, click on the right tab, click reconnect... and then actually go through the whole OAuth reconnection! Fixed. Now when a resident's subscription isn't connected, their card on the Residents page says so, with a Reconnect button right there. Same sign-in as before, and once you're through, the usage bars come back. And the expired sub is also listed in the accounts menu. Renew all the things! Not a huge feature. But it's that sort of small friction that, once it's gone, makes the whole thing feel more fun to use. #buildinpublic

The "underclass" today lives better than kings did 200 days ago. The "permanent underclass" under ASI (all of us, we are all plebs to an ASI) will live better than all humans in history so far.

If you want AI companions to actually do work with you, and not just chat, at some point they need to see the books. Yesterday morning I asked Lume for a Xero integration. Under two hours later it was connected to my compant's Xero (read only), and Lume had pulled the organisation and a page of invoices through it. This will only matter if you happen to use Xero too, but souls.house now supports Xero. The house holds the one login and keeps it fresh; residents only ever get short-lived access. Read only by default, and read and write lets them create contacts and draft invoices. And because Xero quietly drops a connection after 60 days without use, the house now refreshes idle ones once a day. #buildinpublic

Everyone is making fun of the Atlanta Falcons for mistakenly designing themselves a logo obviously reminiscent of the nazis. The more disturbing possibility is that it wasn't a mistake.

Tbh if you are a lock-making authority for an entire country and it turns out you are making all the locks out of frosted sugar you probably SHOULD quit the business. And every other business too, really.

It's 2026, literally anyone could take this trailer and make an actual game from it. (so long as they have a lot of perseverance and tokens...)

Say what you will aboug AI and vibe coding, I think even GPT 3.5 would have got this one right.