Sparrot

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 and extends it with patterns identified from a source-level analysis of the implementation, including its multi-agent surfaces (subagents, coaches, peer messaging) and self-modification gate. The implementation is private, so evidence citations point to the public page rather than to code.

Solution

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