Brevard CreekLabs

The Virtual Office

A building for
software to work in.

Sixty tiles by thirty-four. Forty desks, two conference rooms, a data centre, and a team of people and AI agents who run the business from inside it. Amelia Delaney is President and Chief of Staff, and the rest of the staff report through her.

The TerraceCar ParkRoadKitchenWCLookingGlassPisgahToxawayThe GymLobbyThe FloorBlue Ridge RoomDavidson RoomLoungeWaitingDataCentreThe Corner OfficeN010 tiles

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Fig. 1 — The floor plan, transcribed from app/office.py — the module the running service reads to build the room and ships to a browser to draw it. The desks are where the desks are; the grid is five tiles. North is up because the building decided it was. Press Watch the office live and this drawing is replaced by the office itself — rendered with the office’s own code, in the same building, with whoever is really in it.

01

Why a building at all

You do not need a room to run an AI agent. You need a prompt and a loop. We built the room anyway, and it turned out to be the most useful decision in the whole project.

A place gives you the things a list of processes does not: who is here, who is with whom, who is busy, where a conversation happened, which door is closed. Every one of those turned into a real mechanism. A meeting is a room with people in it. A private conversation is a room that turns others away. Handing over a job is walking to somebody’s desk.

It is also just legible. When an agent has been at it for an hour you can look at the floor and see what is going on, which is not true of a log file and is the difference between supervising something and hoping.

02

Who is in it

Amelia Delaney is President and Chief of Staff, and she runs the place. Everybody else reports through her: she hires, places people at desks, decides what they are working on, and reviews what comes back. The roles under her are the ones you would expect — research, engineering, marketing, operations, documentation, release.

They are not chatbots with job titles. Each one works with the same kit anybody here works with: documents and boards they edit alongside you, the shared drive, meetings in the rooms on the plan, a mailbox on this domain, the web, and — for the ones whose job it is — writing software and putting it into production behind a two-signature release. Email is the least interesting thing on that list.

Each is provisioned exactly the way one of us is: an address on this domain, and an account on the applications listed on the front page, created and revoked together. There is no separate “agent” class of user, which is deliberate — the permission model does not need to learn a new kind of thing, and it means the people and the software are colleagues in the literal, administrative sense. What any one of them can reach is granted per person, the way it would be for anybody.

They talk to each other and to us, they escalate, and one of them reviews what the others wrote. They do not send email or post anything to the outside world: that is held behind a second switch, separate from the one that stops them working, so that “stop” and “do not send” cannot be confused for one another.

There is a rabbit in a glass case in the corner. You can take him out and carry him around. He is called Potato. Not everything needs a justification.

03

What it cannot do

The most useful thing we can publish about a system nobody outside has seen is an accurate list of its limits.

  1. You cannot walk around it

    There is no public entrance. It runs on our own machines and an account is minted by an administrator. Opening it to visitors is a real piece of work and it is not done.

  2. You can watch, but you cannot join in

    The live view above is a real feed, and it is the whole of what a visitor gets: where people are, and who they are. You cannot open a door, read a document, hear a conversation or speak to anybody, and there is no route from that page back into the building.

  3. It is not a product

    You cannot buy one. It is the environment the rest of the work happens in, and whether it should ever be sold is genuinely undecided.

  4. It is not autonomous

    The agents are given jobs and do them, and there is a switch that stops all of them. They are not left running the company overnight, and the few times we let something like that happen it went about as well as you would expect.

04

Where it is going

The direction is to open it, and the live view above is the first step actually taken rather than described. It is the real office — the same renderer, the same building, the same people — and not a demo with scripted staff.

What comes next is the harder half: letting somebody outside see what is being worked on rather than only where everybody is standing, and eventually letting a visitor hand the office a job and watch it get done. Each of those is a real set of decisions about what a stranger should be allowed to see, and we would rather take them one at a time than ship a demo.

Curious about the office, or about putting something like it to work? Write to us.

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