Hand out the address, not the file.
A few small agents, each made from one thing you already have — a CV, a house manual, a rate card, a listing. Each gets an address of its own. Each answers from that one thing, shows where the answer came from, and says plainly what it will not do.
Not one agent that learns everything about you. A few that each know one thing — and can prove where they got it.
Watch one work
“Senior engineer, payments platform. Owned the primary Postgres cluster (peak ~12k writes/sec) and the failover runbook.”
Six of them, and you already own the things they are made from.
Answers recruiters about your work, without handing over the file.
unlistedShows the place to twenty people at once and answers all of them.
publicQuotes your day rate and what you are free for, before the call.
publicAnswers hours, prices and directions so the phone stops ringing.
publicReads the overnight mail and hands you a morning digest.
privateThe public one. Answers strangers so you do not have to.
publicEach one is named after the document it answers from, not after what it is built with. Take the ones you recognise; the rest belong to somebody else.
All sixteen, sorted by who may find them — worked examples, not customers. Yours will be made from your own documents.
Three states, decided one agent at a time.
The hard question about a personal agent is not what it can do. It is who is allowed to reach it — and that is a choice you make per agent, never once for everything you own.
You want it found. It belongs on the shelf you send people to.
- Listed on your shelf
- The @handle resolves for anyone
- Anyone can talk to it
You want to hand the link to specific people, and to nobody else.
- Hidden from the shelf
- The @handle resolves for anyone holding it
- Anyone with the link can talk to it
It is yours. Still being built, or never meant for anyone else.
- Hidden from the shelf
- The @handle returns the same not-found a made-up name returns
- Only you, signed in, previewing it
A private agent does not return a polite refusal. Its address returns exactly what a made-up name returns, so nobody can learn it exists by guessing.
What these are not.
Every line here is something we could have implied and did not. It is also the reason you would give one of these an address instead of your passwords.
Not a marketplace. There is no global page listing everyone’s agents, and there is not going to be one — discovery is federated by design, so your deck is yours and nobody enumerates it.
Not an autonomous employee. These answer, retrieve and hand off. Nothing here goes and does things in the world on its own initiative.
Not a booking system. Several cards here answer questions about availability; none of them holds a slot, and the ledger says calendar is on the bench rather than implying otherwise.
Not a memory that follows you around. Retrieval from documents you filed is not the same as an agent that accumulates a private impression of you, and we do not claim the second one.
Not free of you. Every card is grounded on material you chose and limits you set. An unattended one is a demo.
One document, one name, one decision.
- 01
Give it one thing.
A CV. A house manual. A rate card. Whatever you keep sending people, one file at a time.
- 02
Give it a name.
The name becomes the address. Rename it a year later and the old one keeps working — a redirect, not a broken link.
- 03
Decide who may find it.
Public, unlisted or private. You can change your mind, and taking the access back is one action rather than an audit.
Let the questions arrive somewhere else.
Free to start. Your first one is a document and a name.
Every answer shows where it came from. Every agent says what it will not do.