The request sounds tiny
“Remind me in two minutes to drink water” looks like a timestamp and a sentence. A useful assistant has to hear much more: who asked, which conversation should receive the result, what time zone “two minutes” belongs to, whether the request was later cancelled, and whether the message actually reached the person when it became due.
The timer is the easy part. The promise is that Orbit will still be holding the loose end after the original conversation has moved on.
Why Argus?
Argus Panoptes is the many-eyed watchman of Greek mythology. The story says some of his eyes could sleep while others stayed awake, which is exactly the energy I wanted for a service that watches clocks, changing conditions, background work, and the boundary around your attention.
Argus is not there to stare at everything forever. It keeps the specific watch you asked for, wakes the right work at the right moment, and closes its eyes when that work is cancelled or complete.
Time became its own system
I built Argus as Orbit’s durable time, attention, and delivery service. Reminders, watches, and finite background workflows live there instead of inside a model response or a process-local timer.
That boundary matters. Pluto can understand what you meant, but it does not get to pretend that saying “locked in” made the work durable. The request is only real after Argus has stored it and returned an identity Orbit can inspect, cancel, snooze, or wake later.
A wakeup is not a message
When work becomes due, Argus wakes the right task. Some wakeups already contain a complete message. Others need Pluto to reason over fresh context, like finishing a research brief or deciding whether a watched event actually matters.
Only after that work produces something deliverable does it enter an encrypted outbox. Gateway leases that item, sends it through the verified messaging route, and acknowledges it only after the transport accepts it.
- A process restart can delay work without deleting it.
- A delivery retry reuses the same idempotency key instead of creating a second reminder.
- Work stays attached to the owner and verified conversation that created it.
- Cancellation changes durable state; it is not a conversational promise layered over a live task.
Attention is separate from personality
Orbit can sound playful without earning permission to interrupt you more often. Orbit keeps voice and attention in separate namespaces because “talk like this” and “notify me about this” are different instructions.
Quiet hours, cooldowns, and learned sender or category preferences shape ordinary proactive events. Explicit reminders and watches remain delivery guarantees. If you directly asked Orbit to tell you, a learned mute from some unrelated alert should not swallow it.
The product is the return trip
A lot of assistants are impressive during the first turn. Orbit is being built around the second moment: hours or days later, when the original chat is gone from your attention and the result still comes back.
That changes how I judge the system. The success condition is not that a model understood the request. It is that the work remained inspectable, cancellable, and alive until the person received the outcome.