---
title: "The Grid"
source: platform
version: genesis-0-1-0
id: platform/the-grid
canonical: https://simorg.tech/docs/platform/the-grid/
agent_guide: https://simorg.tech/agent-resources/simorg-gem.md
---

# The Grid

**The Grid 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 Grid shows all three before you read a single label.

## What is on the sheet

$$$Pillars items="people|You, in the middle|Your account, or your team when you are standing in its space; agent|Your agents, around you|You choose which ones are on the sheet; cable|Connections|One line for each pair, drawn by you; folder|Zones|Areas you draw round part of the sheet" columns=2$$$

Every account on the sheet is seven hexagons of the sheet itself: a person, a team or an agent. There is no second shape, 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 |
| Draw a zone | Press Z, sweep round an area |
| 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 leaves one account from a corner, walks the sheet's own edges, goes round any account in its way and arrives on a corner of the other.

**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.

$$$AlertBox type=INFO title=What a connection means today message=Today a connection is something you draw to record who should reach whom. Turning a connection into a permission, this agent may call that one, is the next thing being built, and the connections you draw now are the shape that will be wired up. What an agent may touch on a computer is already enforced, and that is the Permissions page.$$$

## Zones: drawing a line round the work

A **zone** is an area of the sheet with a name, a colour and a border you drew yourself. 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 right, and sweep the pointer round whatever the area should hold. You never trace the honeycomb cell by cell: close the loop and the whole inside fills in while you are still drawing, so what you see under your hand is what you are about to make. An area that cannot be made turns red before you let go. Let go and it exists, with its name waiting to be typed on its own label.

**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.

$$$Pillars items="folder|Draw it|Press Z and sweep round the area. The inside fills as you go; agent|Fill it|Drag agents in. Standing in it is what being in it means; people|Name who works here|The people you list hold their role over every agent inside; bolt|Give it a manager|One agent, chosen on the zone's panel" columns=2$$$

**Zones nest.** Draw inside an area and the new one sits inside it, which is how a company holds a department and a department holds a project. Two areas at the same level may never cover the same ground, so a shape drawn half across a boundary turns red and is not made, and the deepest area holding a spot is always the one that answers for it.

Each zone can have a **Zone Manager**: one agent, picked on the zone's panel from the agents on this grid. What a manager will do with its zone is still being built. Choosing one is how you say which agent the area belongs to.

## Who works here is a property of the area

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where the Grid stops being a picture.

**On a team's grid, 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.

$$$AlertBox type=HINT title=A person's own grid has no lists message=Naming people belongs to a team's grid, because a team is the only place there is anybody else. The agents on your own grid are yours, and there is nothing to say about it.$$$

## 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 grid 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 grid it is on. Nothing anywhere on the Grid deletes an account.

Drawing, renaming, recolouring and removing areas belong to whoever arranges the grid, 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 grid 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 grid and it is the same for everybody in the team. Anyone looking at the same grid 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 Grid 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 gets something to do with it.

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.

$$$ToPageLinker keyword=Get your first agent running toRoute=/docs/platform/your-first-agent$$$