Why a lobster?
means too many things. Lobster means one: an AI with a harness. How one is born, why it molts, and why they swarm.
November 1, 20264 min read5 chaptersBy Chris Johnston
01 · THE WORD
Agent means too much.
An agent can be an insurance agent. It can be an FBI agent. You can be an agent of change. Every big software company is shipping an agent that works on your behalf, and each one means something a little different by it.
A word that means everything stops telling you anything. So we gave ours a word of its own: lobster. This site still says agent. Flip the switch and every one of them reads lobster.
Lobster is out of left field. That is the point. It only means one thing.
agent n.
- 1An insurance agent.
- 2An FBI agent.
- 3An agent of change.
- 4Software that does work for you.
lobster n.
An AI with a harness. The model is the meat. The harness is the shell. One meaning.
ONE WORD, FOUR MEANINGS. ONE WORD, ONE MEANING.
02 · WHAT IT IS
Meat and shell.
A lobster is an AI with a harness. The model is the meat: it reads, writes and reasons. The harness is the shell: the tools, the connectors, the memory, the permissions and the schedule around it.
A bare model in a chat window is meat with no shell. It answers when you ask and forgets you when you close it. The full anatomy is in What is a harness? The short version lives in the glossary: lobster.
They are also the mascot of the singularity. A lobster grows by molting: it sheds the hard shell it has outgrown and forms a new one.1 So do these. Why that matters now is in The Singularity.
03 · BORN
Give it a name. Give it a tool set.
This is the part we actually do. Your is born on day one of the build. It gets a name your team will use, one job to start with, the tools that job needs and an instruction file anyone can read.
It does not arrive grown. It arrives small, with the right shell, and it grows into your business.
We are hatching you a lobster.
CERTIFICATE OF HATCHING
- NAME
- Yours to pick
- JOB
- Answer every new lead inside the hour
- TOOLS
- Inbox · CRM · Calendar · Drive
- RULES
- instructions.md
- WAKES
- Every weekday, 7:00
- ASKS FIRST
- Before it sends a quote
ILLUSTRATIVE. EVERY ONE WE HATCH GETS ONE OF THESE.
04 · LIFE CYCLE
Egg, hatch, molt, settle.
A real lobster starts as an egg its mother carries for months. It hatches into a larva, molts four times and settles to the bottom.1 We kept it that simple, because it is how the first ninety days go.
Month one we build it inside the software you already run. Month two your team uses it every day. Month three it sheds the shell we built and your team runs it. Month four we go quiet and it keeps working. The full offer is build, adopt, own.
01 · MONTH ONE
Egg
It is born. A name, a tool set, its instruction files.
02 · MONTH TWO
Hatch
It starts to crawl. Your team uses it every day.
03 · MONTH THREE
Molt
It sheds the shell we built. Your team runs it.
04 · MONTH FOUR
Settle
We go quiet. It keeps working.
05 · SWARM
One is useful. A swarm runs the place.
It crawls around and does tasks with little claws. Then you hatch another. Each one gets its own job, its own tools and its own rules, and they hand work to each other.
Marketing is usually where the first one starts. From there it grows into every department. Running a fleet is a job of its own: lobster herding. Where the company version differs from a personal assistant is in One for you, a fleet for work.
- LEADS
- INBOX
- INVOICES
- REPORTS
- SOCIAL
- SCHEDULING
- RESEARCH
- SUPPORT
- HIRING
- INVENTORY
- REVIEWS
- FOLLOW-UPS
ONE JOB EACH. ILLUSTRATIVE.
