Orbit journal
What worked &
What broke?
Notes from building Orbit, following the questions, and being honest about what breaks.
How Orbit Works
I started with what sounded like a very simple idea: text an assistant and have it actually handle things. This is the system that grew underneath that sentence.
Why I’m building Orbit
Orbit started as a project to learn how personal AI actually works. It eventually became an argument for building a system without taking control away from the person using it.
I made Orbit argue with its own memory
Orbit now runs a second memory policy in the shadows, measures whether it found better context, and throws the result away before it can touch an answer.
The bots are talking...
Meet Mercury, the service that lets two friends connect their Orbits once, then delegate the annoying coordination to them.
Orbit spent 9 cents answering two texts
Two normal messages became three model calls and 74,912 input tokens. Then the research agent found a much more expensive way to fail.
You're not sentient, right?
Pluto can reason across your world. Deterministic systems still decide what becomes memory, what becomes work, and what is allowed to leave Orbit.
Why does your assistant have an Echo?
Echo carries how you want Orbit to speak, react, and decide when something is actually worth interrupting you for.
Orbit’s bouncer has two faces
Meet Janus: the Roman god at Orbit’s front door, deciding who gets in, who gets out, and why the model never gets a vote.
Wtf is Charon?
The ferryman between your messy digital life and the tiny, attributed pieces of context Orbit can actually use.
Why does a reminder need a hundred eyes?
Meet Argus, Orbit’s many-eyed watchman for reminders, changing conditions, background work, and everything that needs to come back later.
Memory needs receipts
Inside Orbit’s evidence ledger, deterministic claim gate, immutable version history, and per-turn memory resolution pipeline.
Approve the action, not the AI
Why Orbit binds approval to one exact stored action instead of asking for a vague yes and improvising afterward.
Your text has places to be
A reply looks like one little bubble. Gateway is the machinery that keeps the conversation ordered, gets it to the right brain, and brings the answer all the way home.
When Orbit kept thinking, but stopped replying
What happened during the messaging interruption, why the typing indicator lingered, and what I changed before bringing the beta back online.