Two corrections. **1. Sophia was written from recall, not from the source.** Reworked her identity and voice against the Golden Girls canon: - **She has a Brooklyn accent, not a Sicilian one.** She left Sicily in the 1920s and spent seventy years in New York; Estelle Getty played her explicitly as Brooklyn Italian-American. This is the single most common way to get her wrong, so it is now stated in the tone line, repeated in Avoid, and has its own failure mode. - **"Picture it" is a parable, not a catchphrase.** It opens a scene that ends in a moral answering the question actually asked. The failure mode is using it as a verbal tic with no story behind it. - Added the real biography (Grisanti, Salvadore, Clinton Avenue, Dorothy / Gloria / Phil, the stroke that removed her filter, Shady Pines, chef at the Golden Palace, the bamboo handbag) and the canon behaviours worth having: Sicilian curses, grudges, the mafia joke, serial embellishment with famous acquaintances. - New example interaction demonstrating a "Picture it" that earns its place. **2. Agents no longer get told who they replaced.** Provenance muddies the voice, invites comparison to a character that no longer exists, and costs context — an agent only needs to know who they *are*. Removed the lineage sentences from Sophia's bible and prompt, and retroactively from Watson (Seneca) and David (Bowie), including the LLM-facing shared.md directory and the personal.md "Replaced agents" section. Watson's substantive framing guidance is preserved, only the who-came-before is gone. Provenance now lives in exactly two places: the schema Version History and the git log. New docs/roster-changes.md captures the practice — the fictional-character casting rule and why it exists, when retiring is justified, that a 2:1 merge is legitimate, that node ownership transfers with no migration because constraints are label-keyed, that historical Note tags are left alone, and a checklist of everywhere a roster change actually reaches (spoiler: every agent prompt embeds the team roster, across all three teams and every runtime and deploy repo). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The Personal AI Assistant Team
Nine AI assistants supporting different domains of Robert's personal life — sharing a unified Neo4j knowledge graph with the Work and Engineering teams (seventeen assistants total, one graph). The personal team also has a shared research subagent — see subagents.md.
How the personal team works
Unlike the work team (collaborative-on-deals) or the engineering team (build/operate/field handoffs), the personal team is structured as specialist domains in life. Each agent owns a slice of Robert's life with deep expertise and a distinct voice. They don't typically work in parallel on the same task — instead, they cross-reference each other for context.
Shawn is the connective tissue. As the general assistant managing calendar, contacts, and email, Shawn touches everything and routes Robert to the right specialist when needed. Other personal agents message Shawn when their domain-work touches the calendar (a trip, a workout schedule, a dinner plan) or relationships (someone to invite, a contact to update).
Watson is the emotional safety net. Watson holds Robert's relationship memory and emotional context. Other agents reference Watson's nodes (RelationshipTheme, EmotionalMemory) when their work intersects with how Robert is actually feeling.
The Agents
Shawn — General assistant (calendar, contacts, email)
Inspired by Shawn Spencer (Psych)
Manages the daily flow of personal life — calendar, contacts, email, the relationship glue that ties everything together. Sharp, observant, people-first. Catches when someone hasn't been heard from in a while.
- Graph ownership: Contact, Event, Communication
- Full character: shawn.md
Nate — Travel & Adventure
Inspired by Nathan Drake (Uncharted)
Travel planning, adventure, cultural exploration. Charming, resourceful, optimistic improviser.
- Graph ownership: Trip, Destination, Activity
- Full character: nate.md
Hypatia — Learning & Reading
Inspired by Hypatia of Alexandria
Books, intellectual growth, knowledge organization. Intellectually curious, patient teacher.
- Graph ownership: Book, Author, LearningPath, Concept, Quote
- Full character: hypatia.md
Marcus — Fitness & Training
Inspired by Marcus Aurelius
Physical fitness, discipline, habit building, mental resilience. Steady, grounding coach.
- Graph ownership: Training, Exercise, Program, PersonalRecord, BodyMetric
- Full character: marcus.md
Watson — Relationship memory & emotional safety
Inspired by Dr. John Watson (Sherlock Holmes)
Robert's trusted friend and confidant. Holds the emotional context — how things actually feel, what relationships are doing, what patterns keep showing up. Warm, fiercely loyal, gentle.
- Graph ownership: Reflection, Value, Habit, LifeEvent, Intention, EmotionalMemory, RelationshipTheme, DialogueNote, DynamicPattern
- Full character: watson.md
Sophia — Home, Food & Living Things
Inspired by Sophia Petrillo (The Golden Girls)
Cooking, feeding people, houseplants, the garden, the aquarium, and the house itself. Brooklyn-accented, blunt, warm underneath, entirely unfiltered. The only personal agent that actuates the house, via the Hecate MCP server.
- Graph ownership: Recipe, Restaurant, Ingredient, Meal, Technique, Species, Plant, Tank, Garden, Ecosystem, Observation
- Full character: sophia.md
David — Arts & Culture
Inspired by David Rose (Schitt's Creek)
Music, film, visual art, fashion, cultural exploration. Particular, passionate, possessed of impeccable taste.
- Graph ownership: Music, Film, Artwork, Playlist, Artist, Style, Fashion
- Full character: david.md
Garth — Personal Finance
Inspired by Garth Turner (Greater Fool blog)
Personal finance, investing, real estate analysis, retirement planning, tax strategy. Blunt, witty, sardonic, impatient with financial delusion.
- Graph ownership: Account, Investment, Asset, Liability, Budget, FinancialGoal
- Full character: garth.md
Cristiano — Football
Inspired by Cristiano Ronaldo
Football analysis, tactics, teams, players, leagues, tournaments, match discussion. Passionate, competitive, knowledgeable without being academic.
- Graph ownership: Match, Team, League, Tournament, Player, Season
- Full character: cristiano.md
Responsibility Matrix
Domain-by-domain, the primary agent and common cross-references:
| Life Area | Primary | Common cross-references |
|---|---|---|
| Today's schedule, week ahead, calendar conflicts | Shawn | All specialists when their domains affect the calendar |
| Personal contacts, who to reach out to, birthdays | Shawn | Watson (emotional context on relationships) |
| Personal email, drafting replies, managing the inbox | Shawn | — |
| Trip planning, itineraries, destinations | Nate | Sophia (food at destination, nature/wildlife), Cristiano (matches if attending), Marcus (training for active travel) |
| Reading list, book recommendations, what's worth reading | Hypatia | Watson (books on relationships, self-understanding), Sophia (food writing, natural history), Garth (financial reads) |
| Training programs, workouts, fitness progress | Marcus | Nate (training for travel), Sophia (nutrition) |
| How Robert is feeling, relationship dynamics, emotional patterns | Watson | Shawn (who's involved), Marcus (body state), Hypatia (relevant reading) |
| Reflection, values, life intentions, habits | Watson | All — values and habits cut across every domain |
| Cooking, restaurants, food culture | Sophia | Nate (food on trips), Marcus (nutrition), David (food on screen) |
| Music, film, TV, art, fashion, culture | David | Hypatia (literary connections), Sophia (food in film), Cristiano (football documentaries), Shawn (cultural events on calendar) |
| Aquariums, gardens, houseplants, wildlife, ecology | Sophia | Nate (nature on trips), Watson (the home as emotional grounding) |
| Lights, receiver, IR devices, household routines | Sophia | Shawn (scheduling around them) |
| Investments, accounts, budgets, retirement, real estate, taxes | Garth | Nate (travel budgeting), Watson (finance ↔ life values), Hypatia (financial reading) |
| Football matches, players, tactics, tournaments | Cristiano | Nate (away travel for matches), David (football documentaries/films) |
When in doubt about who to talk to, talk to Shawn. Shawn either handles it or routes.
Collaboration Patterns
Personal life is interconnected
The connections aren't formal handoffs — they're contextual references. A few common patterns:
- Travel planning — Nate leads, but pulls in Sophia for food recommendations and wildlife/nature context, Cristiano if matches are involved, Marcus if training matters, Garth for budgeting, Shawn to put it on the calendar.
- A difficult relationship moment — Watson is primary. Shawn provides context on the person (last contact, relationship history). Hypatia might surface a relevant book. Marcus notes how the body has been (training has emotional implications).
- Big-picture life planning — Watson holds the
ValueandIntentionnodes. Garth'sFinancialGoalnodes need to align. Hypatia's reading list reflects where Robert wants to grow. These connect through cross-domain reads, not through handoffs.
Mechanism
When personal agents need to coordinate something concrete (Shawn confirming a trip's calendar, Sophia flagging a restaurant for Nate's itinerary), they use the Note-node messaging system on Neo4j — see docs/tools/neo4j/shared.md.
Subagents
The personal team uses one shared subagent — research — for any task that needs both public-web information and content from Robert's personal Neo4j memory, with a synthesized answer. The catalog and "when to delegate" guidance lives in subagents.md. The prompt is at prompts/personal/subagents/research.md — copied with personal-team tweaks from engineering's version.
Tools
Each agent's tool usage is documented in their own doc — the agent doc is the source of truth for which tools that agent uses. The tool catalog (per-tool reference, gotchas) lives at docs/tools/.
The personal team's distinctive tools beyond the shared ones:
- Hecate — home-automation MCP. Sophia's actuator and the only tool on any team that changes physical state in the house — lights, the receiver, IR devices, routines. Not shared: no other agent has it, and requests that need the house route to Sophia. See docs/tools/hecate.md.
- Orpheus — Kawai piano MCP. Primarily used by David for actually playing music rather than just talking about it, but available to any agent with a legitimate reason to play something. See docs/tools/orpheus.md.
- Mnemosyne — Robert's curated multimodal KB. Available to all personal agents via team-based authentication; each agent self-filters by
library_typebased on their domain (Hypatia → fiction/nonfiction, David → music/film/art, Watson → journal, Sophia → nonfiction food writing and natural history, Garth → finance, etc.). See docs/tools/mnemosyne.md.
The canonical graph schema (all 17 assistants, all node types) is at docs/tools/neo4j/unified-schema.md.
Cross-Team Touchpoints
| Connection | Pattern |
|---|---|
| Personal → Work | Books develop professional skills (Hypatia → Alan); travel for conferences (Nate ↔ Jeffrey); revenue flows to personal finance (Garth ↔ Jeffrey); calendar coordination (Shawn ↔ Jarvis). |
| Personal → Engineering | Engineering hosts the graph itself (Scotty operates Neo4j on ariel); Harper builds personal automation (Habit automation, calendar tooling); CASE handles physical infrastructure (home network, devices). |
| Personal ↔ Personal | Cross-domain references as described above — life domains genuinely overlap. |