Estate

System Overview

A personal AI-assistant estate for one operator — the edge Worker as instant front door, the Hub and Tower as background muscle.

Dated 2026-06-15Programme Estate

Situation

This document is the entry point to a self-contained six-document estate description: Mallory is a voice-first personal assistant/second-brain for a single operator, and Hermes is a separate, general-purpose agent harness recently brought online as a second "doer" — today mainly an autonomous developer and an experimental second brain, with delegation from Mallory as the long-term direction.

The estate is built, run, and paid for by one person on a tight time/cost budget, so simplicity, maintainability, and "always up" are prioritised over completeness or enterprise robustness — the yardstick reviewers should calibrate to throughout.

Key decisions

Edge-local invariant

The Worker reads only D1/KV/R2 on the hot path and never calls the Hub or the Tower to answer a request; they push inbound and may poll it. This keeps Mallory instant and up even when home infrastructure is down.

Vault as durable truth

Everything important is a Markdown note with a freshness stamp; D1/KV are derived/edge caches fed from the vault, not the source of record.

Personality is invariant; context changes

Mallory's character never shifts with mode or situation — only what he knows about the operator's current context does.

Voice-first

Rich content (tables, charts, links) is an opt-in attachment he verbally points to, not the primary channel.

Conservative proactivity

Outbound nudges respect quiet hours, daily caps, dedup, and current mode; a genuinely urgent item can override, a low one never interrupts.

Deploys are gated

Every change lands via a reviewed PR; production migrations/deploys are performed deliberately, not automatically.

Architecture

Six pieces spanning Cloudflare edge, a home-server Tower, and an always-on Hub VM, tied together by inbound-only pushes into the edge.

Edge Worker (mallory-core)

The conversational brain + API at api.mallory.chat — stateless-ish, instant, no dependency on home infrastructure on the hot path.

Web app

SvelteKit PWA at debrief.mallory.chat — the primary UI: chat, voice canvas, feed, settings.

Android app

A thin WebView shell around the PWA adding native FCM push and a JS bridge for native deep-links.

Hub runtime (mallory-runtime)

A small always-on VM running scheduled connector jobs (calendar, email/Slack monitoring, research) that push digests to the edge.

Vault

An Obsidian Markdown + git note store — the durable source of truth for knowledge, mirrored on the Hub and Tower.

Hermes

The agent harness on a home-server KVM VM ("the Tower") — its own model routing, memory, skills, gateways, and local API.

Risks & guardrails

Lagging replica

Because context arrives via inbound push rather than live calls, edge context is a lagging replica of the Hub/Tower state — freshness can degrade even though availability doesn't.

spec · docs/estate/00-overview.md

Mallory · Estate briefing