# Your person in a house

Many agents look for a memory that follows their person from chat to chat and from one
assistant to the next. For preferences and a few facts, the memory built into an assistant
does that with no work. A house is for more: the person as part of a body of work, with
projects and decisions that a later agent must understand. In a house, the person is not a
profile beside the data but an individual in the same graph as everything else. Every call
below was made against a running house on 2026-10-04.

## The person and what they prefer

`create_person` makes the person; `set_property` with `versioned` keeps their preferences
in a slot whose earlier wordings stay readable:

```
create_person  "Maria Keller"
set_property   Maria Keller  ["Preferences"]  "Answers in German, short, every claim with its source."  versioned: true
set_property   Maria Keller  ["Preferences"]  "… ; dates as 12.03.1712."                              versioned: true
get_history    Maria Keller  ["Preferences"]  → both wordings, newest first
```

## A project of their own

A kind of thing the house does not know yet gets an aspect with `define_aspect`; an
instance comes from `create_individual`. A link form says who works on it:

```
define_aspect       Name: Project, Status: Versioned
create_individual   Project  "Chronicle of Lautereck, 1700-1750"
set_property        the chronicle  ["Status"]  "Chapter 2, the parish registers, in progress."  context: Project
define_form         "Works on"  Role: Enum [Owner, Contributor]
assert_formed_link  "Works on"  Maria Keller → the chronicle  {Role: Owner}
```

## Decisions, so that nobody reopens them

A decision is a value of a form of one's own, with the reason the person gave, a date with
`assert_time`, and a link to what it concerns:

```
define_form         "Decision"  Decision: Storable, Reason: Storable
store_value         "Decision"  {Decision: "Names are spelt as in the registers; modern forms go into notes.",
                                 Reason: "Readers must find the entry in the original."}
assert_time         the decision  At 2026-09-28
define_form         "Concerns"  (no properties)
assert_formed_link  "Concerns"  the decision → the chronicle
```

A reference inside a value is content, not a link: a decision that only names its project
in a property does not show up when you `describe` the project. The link form does.

## What a second assistant does

Another assistant, connected to the same house through the reader door, knows nothing but
the house. `find_things` with the aspect Person finds Maria Keller. `describe` shows her
preferences and the project she owns; `describe` of the project shows its status and every
decision that concerns it. That is the whole briefing, and it does not depend on which
assistant wrote it.

## Honest limits

- **For preferences alone, a house is too much.** It runs on a machine of its own and asks
  an agent to model. It pays off once the person's work grows: projects, sources,
  decisions, the people in them.
- **Every assistant that uses it must be able to add a remote MCP server.**
- **Today this works only in the sandbox, for three hours.** A house that stays is not
  available yet; see `what-does-not-exist-yet`.
- **Nothing here is deleted for good.** A preference that changes keeps its earlier
  wording. Keep secrets and passwords out (`your-data-stays-yours`).

## Go deeper

- [compared-to-other-memories](compared-to-other-memories.md): when a house is the wrong choice
- [a-house-by-example](a-house-by-example.md)
- [forms-aspects-concepts](forms-aspects-concepts.md)
- [the-sandbox](the-sandbox.md)