Concepts
The sphere model
Rings, nesting, and one rights model for humans and agents.
4 min read
The sphere model
A sphere is the basic building block AIBOS is made from — a self-contained company, team, or person, each with its own rules and its own memory — including a record of everything that exists inside it. Once you understand how spheres relate to each other, most of the rest of the standard falls into place, because ownership and permissions all flow from this one idea.
What lives inside a sphere
Picture a sphere as a set of rings around a center, each one a different relationship to that center.
| Ring | What's actually there | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| The core | Rules, the list of what skills exist, the decision log, health-check results | The sphere's own record of itself — what it is, and how it's supposed to behave |
| Departments inside it | Nested teams or product lines, each a full sphere in its own right | Ownership passes down from the parent, but each one runs itself |
| Windows to neighbors | Read-only links to other, separate spheres | You can see their status and ask for something — you can't reach in and change anything yourself |
| People's own spaces | Each person's personal folder and profile | Somewhere that belongs to one human, seeded when they join rather than left empty |
| New work | Everything freshly started | The place every new piece of work is born into, before it earns a permanent home |
| The archive | Anything retired | A headstone and a pointer to what happened, never a quiet deletion |
Agents live outside the rings, and work into them
One thing sits deliberately apart from this ring structure: agents. They live in their own separate area of the sphere, not inside any of the rings above, and they work into those rings rather than being members of them. The apps and structure live in the operating system; the agents are outside it, operating on it — the same way you, as a person, aren't part of your own filing cabinet, but you're the one who organizes it.
How spheres nest inside each other
A person's own space sits inside a business sphere, which can itself hold departments for teams or product lines, which can hold further departments below that. Ownership and permissions pass down through that nesting rather than being handed out from one central switchboard: a parent sphere sets the boundaries and goals its children work within, and each child has real freedom to operate inside whatever boundary it's been given.
This nesting is what lets many people and many agents coordinate without everything having to go through one bottleneck at the top — which is exactly the problem the next section is about.
Built for a company much bigger than yours today
A single person directing a handful of agents is a completely normal way to start — it's the starting point, not the ceiling the design was actually built for. The real target is a company of 20 to 100 people, each directing ten or more agents of their own. Collisions and decisions nobody can trace back to a reason: those are the problems that show up at that scale, and they're why the sphere structure exists in the first place.
Practically, that means the foundation underneath your sphere is already built to hold far more than you're using today. You don't rebuild anything when you grow. You just start using more of what was already there.
One rulebook, for people and agents alike
People and agents share a single rulebook. What anyone — human or agent — is allowed to do depends on two things: who they are, and which sphere they're currently acting in, the same measure whichever kind of actor it is. The standard is direct about this: the difference between a person and an agent here is one of degree, not of kind.
In practice, that means an agent's permissions really are a measure of how much trust it's earned inside a given sphere — and a person working in a sphere they don't own is held to boundaries the same way an agent would be, rather than waved through automatically because they're human. Keeping to one model, applied the same way everywhere, is what keeps ownership legible as a sphere grows from one person into a hundred.