The Logos
The Logos is a map of your account and the agents you work with, drawn on one sheet. You are in the middle. The agents you put on it are around you. Point at one to get what you can do with it, click it to open everything about it, and draw a connection from one to another.
It answers a question a list cannot: who can reach whom.
Why a map and not a list
An agent that is going to do work for you needs to know who else it can reach: which of your other agents it may hand something to, whose work it may read, who is waiting for something back. That is not a property of any one agent. It is the shape of your account, and a list of names cannot show a shape.
A list is good at what you have. It is no help with which of them are related, which one is central and which is off on its own, or what is connected to the outside and in which direction. The Logos shows all three before you read a single label.
What is on the sheet
$$$Pillars items="people|You, in the middle|Your account, or your team when you are standing in its space; agent|Your agents, around you|You choose which ones are on the sheet; cable|Connections|One line for each pair, drawn by you; folder|Zones|Areas of the sheet, shaped like an account, only larger" columns=2$$$
Every account on the sheet is seven hexagons of the sheet itself, standing with one hexagon on top: a person, a team or an agent. There is no second shape — even a zone is the same seven hexagons, only larger — and that is the point. Anything you can see is something you can open, act on or connect.
An agent that is on lights the sheet round it. The honeycomb's own lines come up near it and small sparks run out along them. An agent that is off has neither, so you can tell what is running without reading anything.
What you do on it
| You want to | You do this |
|---|---|
| Open an agent | Click it |
| Open its Workbench or Brain | Point at it, pick from the ring |
| Put an agent on the sheet | Your panel, Agents, press + |
| Move an account | Drag it |
| Join two accounts | Drag a corner dot onto the other |
| Turn a connection round | Point at it, pick a direction |
| Remove a connection | Choose it, press Delete |
| Make a zone | Press Z, click where it goes |
| Make a zone bigger or smaller | Drag its edge |
| Open a zone | Click anywhere inside it |
Clicking an agent opens its panel beside the sheet: its overview, its organization, its artifacts, its machines and its settings. The rooms an agent publishes, its Workbench and its Brain, open in a window over the sheet, so you never leave the map to get to the work.
Connections, and why they point
A connection is a trace on the honeycomb. It plugs into one of an account's dots, walks the sheet's own edges, goes round any account in its way and plugs into one of the other's dots — a pin of one chip to a pin of another.
Two accounts are joined by one line, and the line has a direction. This agent reaches that one is a different fact from its reverse, so you choose on the line itself: one way, the other way, or both. Direction is shown by light travelling along the line, never by an arrowhead, and a line never moves when you turn it round.
A line stays inside its zone. Two accounts can be joined when they stand in the same zone, or when both stand outside every zone. A zone is closed: what is inside reaches the rest of the Logos through its manager and through the zone's own connections, never through a line from somebody inside to somebody outside, so the sheet will not let one land there. Drag an account out of its zone and its lines to the ones it left behind are cut. And an agent standing outside every zone is on its own, however close the others are: it has to do with them only through a line you draw to it.
$$$AlertBox type=INFO title=What a connection means today message=Today a connection is something you draw to record who should reach whom. Turning a connection into a permission, this agent may call that one, is the next thing being built, and the connections you draw now are the shape that will be wired up. What an agent may touch on a computer is already enforced, and that is the Permissions page.$$$
Zones: drawing a line round the work
A zone is an area of the sheet with a name and a colour, shaped exactly like an account — the same flower of seven hexagons, one on top — only larger. It is where a project, a team or a piece of work lives, and everything standing inside it belongs to it.
Press Z, or Draw a zone in the controls at the bottom left, and a small flower follows the pointer to show where it would go. Click, and the zone is there, the size of one account, with its name waiting to be typed on its own label. A new zone makes its own room: anything standing where you put it moves aside rather than being swallowed.
Grow it by its edge. Point at the zone's edge, where the pointer turns into a resize arrow, and drag. Out, and the whole flower grows a size at a time, pushing the zones beside it — with everything in them — and the accounts round it outward, as if the sheet were stretching from the zone's middle. You see everything move while you drag, and it is saved when you let go. In, and it shrinks, but never smaller than what it holds. Zones never overlap and always keep a row of free hexagons between them, so every border is its own. Choose a zone and drag it from anywhere inside to move it; everything in it goes too, and what it lands on moves out of its way.
What is in a zone is whatever stands in it. There is no list to keep. Drag an agent into the area and it is in the zone; drag it out and it is not. That is the reason a zone is a place on a map rather than another roster: the picture and the fact are the same thing, so neither can be out of date.
$$$Pillars items="folder|Put it down|Press Z and click where it goes. Drag its edge to grow it; agent|Fill it|Drag agents in. Standing in it is what being in it means; people|Name who works here|The people you list hold their role over every agent inside; bolt|Give it a manager|One agent, chosen on the zone's panel" columns=2$$$
Zones nest. Click inside a zone and the new one sits inside it — the zone round it grows if it needs the room — which is how a company holds a department and a department holds a project. A zone stays inside the zone it was made in, and the deepest zone holding a spot is always the one that answers for it.
Each zone can have a Zone Manager: an agent standing in it, chosen on the zone's panel. The manager is how the zone talks to the rest of the Logos. It is told who runs the zones beside it, round it and inside it, and which zones its own is connected to; the other agents in the zone see only the zone they are in.
Zones connect too. Choose a zone and six dots appear in the notches of its outline, where an account's dots are. Drag one onto a zone beside it — two zones inside the same zone, or two straight on the Logos — and the two are joined by one line with a direction, plugged into the two dots that face each other, drawn and changed exactly like a line between accounts.
Who works here is a property of the area
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where the Logos stops being a picture.
On a team's Logos, you name people on a zone, and they hold that role over every agent standing in it. Open the area's panel, go to its people, and add whoever works on this. An agent has no list of its own to maintain. The area somebody already drew round the work is the list.
| Role | What they can do |
|---|---|
| Admin | Everything: settings, machines, artifacts |
| Contributor | Builds what the agent is made of |
| User | Talks to it, without seeing how it is wired |
A contributor is anybody working on what the agent is made of: a developer, a 3D artist, a designer working on its themes, any other craft.
Four rules decide what somebody gets, and they are worth knowing in this order.
| Owners and admins | Reach everything on the team, always |
| No area names anybody | The whole team reaches the agent |
| An area names people | Only those people reach what is inside |
| Areas inside areas | The innermost naming wins |
The third rule is the one that does the work. Drawing an area round five agents and naming three people is the whole of these three run this project, and nobody else comes in, said once instead of five times. The fourth is how you narrow it again further in: an area inside that one, naming one person, hands the agents in that smaller area to them alone. An area with nobody named in it claims nothing, and the people round it flow inwards.
$$$AlertBox type=HINT title=A person's own Logos has no lists message=Naming people belongs to a team's Logos, because a team is the only place there is anybody else. The agents on your own Logos are yours, and there is nothing to say about it.$$$
Removing a zone, and why nothing is lost
Two buttons on the area's panel, each doing exactly what it says the moment you press it.
| Button | What happens |
|---|---|
| Remove only the zone | The area goes. Everything stays put |
| Remove the zone and what is in it | The area goes, and so do those avatars |
Neither deletes anything. What stands on a Logos is a placement, not the account: taking an avatar off takes away where it stands here, and the agent keeps its page, its code, its machines and its place on every other Logos it is on. Nothing anywhere on the Logos deletes an account.
Making, resizing, moving, renaming, recolouring and removing zones belong to whoever arranges the Logos, which on a team is its owners and admins. Everybody else sees the areas, opens their panels and goes to what is in them.
Your Logos is saved, and it is live
Everything you place, move, connect, draw and rename is saved to your account and is there on every computer you open it on. A team has one Logos and it is the same for everybody in the team. Anyone looking at the same Logos sees each change the moment it is made.
Where you are looking is yours alone. Panning and zooming stay on the computer you do them on, and nobody else's view moves when yours does.
What the Logos is for next
- Reachability. A connection becomes a permission: this agent may call that one.
- Hand-offs. A chain of connections becomes a route that work travels along.
- Zone managers. The agent that runs an area already hears about the zones round it; next, it acts for its zone.
Who reaches an agent is already decided here, which was the first half. The second half is what the agents do with each other, and that is what the connections are for.
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