Sparrot

Type: app · Vendor: Marco Nissen · Language: Python · License: proprietary · Status: private · Status in practice: experimental

Links: homepage

Self-hosted, file-native personal cognitive agent that runs on its own cadence, remembers by writing Markdown, gates speech through persistent affect scalars, and treats the LLM as an interchangeable medium rather than its identity.

Description. Sparrot is a single-user personal agent framed by its author as 'a continuous awareness that runs through an LLM as its medium' rather than a chatbot or assistant. It runs continuously on its own cadence, with reflection cycles described as 'System 2 sleep'; its memory is plain Markdown across a few hundred files; every self-edit is recorded in an append-only ledger. Identity is anchored in a charter document the agent cannot rewrite, and affective state is captured as six persistent scalars that decay over time and gate when the agent speaks. The author publishes an illustrated 'Anatomy of Sparrot' plate that names 24 catalog patterns as features of the bird (charter as scroll in beak, critic as shadow on shoulder, dreaming as the loam, model routing as four tongues, and so on); the member list below mirrors that mapping. The implementation is private; this entry documents only the publicly described shape.

Agent loop shape. Self-pacing tick loop with no external trigger required: the agent wakes on an internal schedule (shorter intervals when something is alive, longer while idle), reads its charter, recent thoughts, workspace and affect, performs one move per tick (continue a thought, observe, consolidate, read, write), appends the result as a Markdown file, and records the write in an append-only ledger. Chat from the human is one of several wake sources and shares the same chain of thought as autonomous ticks. Periodic deeper passes ('reflection cycles', described publicly as System 2 sleep) consolidate short-term thoughts into longer-term insights. The LLM provider is treated as plumbing — the loop, files and charter are the identity surface.

Primary use cases

single-user continuous cognitive agent that runs on its own cadence
file-native memory and identity persisted across restarts as Markdown
self-paced thinking with reflection / consolidation cycles, not request-response
affect-gated speech where emotional state decides whether to interrupt the human

flowchart TB CH[(Charter inviolable identity)] MOTIV[Motivations coherence / curiosity] AFF[6 affect scalars persistent, decaying] TICK[Self-paced tick loop] LLM[(LLM interchangeable medium)] MD[(Markdown memory)] LED[(Append-only ledger)] SLEEP[Reflection cycles System 2 sleep] MARCO[Marco] CH --> TICK MOTIV --> TICK AFF --> TICK TICK --> LLM TICK --> MD TICK --> LED MD -.reads.-> TICK SLEEP -.consolidates.-> MD AFF -.gates speech.-> MARCO MARCO <-.chat = one wake source.-> TICK

Key concepts

Charter → constitutional-charter (docs) — Inviolable identity document the agent reads each tick and is forbidden from rewriting; the only file outside the agent's own write authority.
Tick loop → mode-adaptive-cadence (docs) — Self-paced wake schedule that runs continuously on its own cadence, faster when engaged and slower while idle.
Markdown memory → cross-session-memory (docs) — A few hundred Markdown files act as both episodic stream and long-term insight store; nothing retained without a file.
Append-only ledger → provenance-ledger (docs) — Every write and self-edit is recorded in an append-only JSONL ledger for traceability.
Reflection cycles → dream-consolidation-cycle (docs) — Periodic deeper passes that consolidate short and mid-term thoughts into long-term insights; described publicly as 'System 2 sleep'.
Affect scalars → emotional-state-persistence (docs) — Six bounded, decaying affective scalars that persist across restarts and gate when the agent speaks.
Motivations, not tasks (docs) — Standing drives (coherence, curiosity, self-awareness, progress) replace a queue of user tasks as the impulse for what each tick attends to.
LLM as medium → multi-model-routing (docs) — The model provider is treated as interchangeable plumbing; identity lives in the loop, charter and files, not in the LLM behind the API.