Bots
Bots
A bot is your own assistant, running on a Claude Code or Codex harness in its own microVM and talking to you in a messenger. It is not a chat session that forgets you — it stays.
What a bot is
- Its own computer. Each bot has a microVM with a home folder that survives restarts and new VMs: its projects, sessions, tools.
- In your chats. It answers in the workspace's channels (Telegram, Slack), in its own thread or as a workspace's default bot. It takes orders only from the workspace's owners; anyone else is a guest.
- Remembers. Household memory keeps its notes across sessions and even across harness changes.
- Yours to shape. Its instructions, skills, environment, schedule and resources are set on its page, and the bot can change most of them itself.
- Fenced in. It reaches only the hosts the workspace allows, and uses your keys only as placeholders it cannot read. It asks you when it needs more.
Bots, sideworkers, scouts
| Bot | Sideworker | Scout | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What | Your long-lived assistant | Extra hands a bot starts for one task | A specialist a bot calls for one task |
| Lives | Until you remove it | Until the task is done and it is closed | One run, then its VM is deleted |
| Sees | Its own home and memory | Its parent's home and memory | Nothing of the bot: only its own access |
| Access | The workspace's network and secrets | Its parent's | Only its capabilities, which you set |
| Starts | When you add it | When its bot decides | When you press Run |
A bot uses a sideworker for a long or parallel job in its own projects, and a scout for what it should not hold itself: the untrusted internet, a production key, a closed network.
Add a bot
Workspace → Bots → + Add bot: its name, display name, emoji and the channels it joins; then the harness and key it runs on; then its CPU and memory. house onboard walks through the same in a terminal.
Its page
Click a bot's card to open its page. Buttons at the top:
- Console — what its terminal shows right now, read-only (for harnesses that run in a terminal).
- Logs — what Household did with it: messages, turns, network requests, its VM.
- Restart — restarts its VM with a fresh session. Files, packages and memory stay. Let it save its work first (up to 3 minutes) or Restart now.
- Edit bot — display name, emoji, aliases. Everything else has its own tab.
A disabled bot shows a bar with Enable on every tab.
Tabs
Overview — at a glance: channels, next and last scheduled task, sideworkers, resources, open previews, its settings. At the bottom: Disable (stops its VM, keeps everything) and Remove (its VM goes and it leaves its channels; files stay on disk).
Harness — Claude Code or Codex, the key, model, reasoning effort and permission mode. If a change needs a new session, the tab says so before you save.
AGENTS.md — its CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md: who it is and how it works. Read at the start of each session.
Lifecycle — a scheduled restart for a clean context: how often, when, how much notice. A shutdown message lets it write a handoff note; a wake-up message picks it up.
Channels — a switch per workspace channel: where it answers. Make default gives it the messages addressed to no one in a shared channel.
Inboxes — Receives to get an inbox's events, Silent to keep them in its history without waking it. See Inboxes.
Scheduled tasks — instructions it gets on a schedule, once or repeating, in its own session. Recent runs show what it answered. Times in the Household time zone; failed runs are not retried.
Skills — its own skills, besides the workspace's Shared Skills and the built-in ones. It writes and edits skills itself too.
Environment — two Bash scripts: Setup once per new VM (packages, tools), On start at every boot (services). Its home survives a new VM; these rebuild the rest. Run now tries the saved script.
Volumes — folders of your computer it sees at /volumes/<name>: a switch per shared folder of the workspace, + Share folder for a new one, and where its home is. See Shared folders.
Memory — its notes by key. core is loaded at the start of every session; the rest it looks up. Search, edit and browse a note's versions.
Resources — what its VM uses (CPU, memory, disk; 7 days) next to what it is given. A new allocation applies on its next Restart or Enable.
Dreaming — soon.
A sideworker's page has only Overview, Skills, Memory and Resources: what runs it, its channels and its tasks are its parent's. Close on its Overview removes its VM; the shared files stay.
More: Shared folders · Adding MCP servers · Back up and move.