The question behind the question

Our sibling house AidePersona builds personal AI — assistants that adapt to a person across work and life. That is the maison's answer to what should the assistant do? SigmaClava holds the question underneath it: what should living with one be like?

These are different questions, and conflating them is how the industry keeps shipping presence without earning it.

Task competence is not presence

An assistant that schedules well has earned a place in your calendar. It has not earned a place in your kitchen, your arguments, your children's bedtime. Presence — being ambiently there in family life — is a different grant of trust, and the interesting thing about trust at family scale is that it is not granted by the user. It is granted by the household, including its least-consulted members.

What we watch for

Our program studies presence as a designed thing with real parts:

• Boundaries. Not settings pages — lived boundaries. Who can the presence speak to, about what, when? Does the household know? Can a child tell where it ends?
• Emotional regulation. Machines that respond to human feeling can amplify it or steady it. A presence in a home has a duty to know which it is doing.
• Exit. A companionable presence must be removable without grief engineering. If leaving is designed to hurt, the design is extractive.

Why family scale

We run these questions in our own home before we say anything about them. Family-scale deployment is slow and small, and that is the point: a household is the one environment where a design cannot hide behind aggregate metrics. Someone at the table will tell you the truth.

The program is active and internal. When something survives being lived with, it will appear here.