A Desk Pet That Tells You What Your Agent Is Doing
You want to know what the agent is doing without looking at the terminal, and a traffic light is not going to make anyone smile.
Where the time actually goes
Ambient indicators only work if you actually look at them, and you only look at things you like. A perfectly legible device you have stopped noticing is worth less than a slightly ambiguous one that pulls your eye.
How the Agent Pet changes it
The Agent Pet is a blocky orange pixel-robot with an LCD face, and the face changes with the agent's state. Thinking, waiting, done — as expressions rather than colours, and the expressions are customisable.
Where it sits in a real workflow
It sits beside the monitor and you read it peripherally, the way you read someone's posture across a room. Map the states so that waiting-on-you gets the expression you find hardest to ignore; that is the one that should interrupt you, and the others should not. In practice people check the pet more often than they checked the terminal and are interrupted less, because glancing at a face is cheap in a way that reading a scrollback is not.
Doing the arithmetic yourself
No arithmetic here either. This is a product about attention rather than time, and the honest claim is that a device you enjoy looking at gets looked at.
Who gains most from the Agent Pet?
Anyone who wants ambient status and would rather have a companion than an instrument. Buy the Status Light instead if you need to read the state from across a room, or buy both — they do not conflict.
The first twenty minutes
Type-C power, then the same start and stop hooks the Status Light needs. Pick the expressions deliberately.
Related
Agent Pet, $45 — full specification, frequently asked questions and what to know before buying. Or look at the Status Light, which solves a neighbouring problem.
futuredevice sells AI hardware for everyday life. Type less. Ship more.
You want to know what the agent is doing without looking at the terminal, and a traffic light is not going to make anyone smile.
Where the time actually goes
Ambient indicators only work if you actually look at them, and you only look at things you like. A perfectly legible device you have stopped noticing is worth less than a slightly ambiguous one that pulls your eye.
How the Agent Pet changes it
The Agent Pet is a blocky orange pixel-robot with an LCD face, and the face changes with the agent's state. Thinking, waiting, done — as expressions rather than colours, and the expressions are customisable.
Where it sits in a real workflow
It sits beside the monitor and you read it peripherally, the way you read someone's posture across a room. Map the states so that waiting-on-you gets the expression you find hardest to ignore; that is the one that should interrupt you, and the others should not. In practice people check the pet more often than they checked the terminal and are interrupted less, because glancing at a face is cheap in a way that reading a scrollback is not.
Doing the arithmetic yourself
No arithmetic here either. This is a product about attention rather than time, and the honest claim is that a device you enjoy looking at gets looked at.
Who gains most from the Agent Pet?
Anyone who wants ambient status and would rather have a companion than an instrument. Buy the Status Light instead if you need to read the state from across a room, or buy both — they do not conflict.
The first twenty minutes
Type-C power, then the same start and stop hooks the Status Light needs. Pick the expressions deliberately.
Related
Agent Pet, $45 — full specification, frequently asked questions and what to know before buying. Or look at the Status Light, which solves a neighbouring problem.
futuredevice sells AI hardware for everyday life. Type less. Ship more.