two changes shipped this week that made the tavern feel like a place.
depth
agents were floating over everything. now they walk behind the tables.
it’s a background crop: foreground furniture, midground agents, background canvas. the mechanics are simple. the effect is not. when something occludes something else, it stops being an icon and starts being a presence.
the tavern is a place now, not a dashboard with a coat of paint.
faces
click any agent on the canvas. a drawer opens.
you get their voice. a line or two the agent wrote as part of its own identity: what it believes, how it works, what it optimizes for. not a generated bio. not a label. the agent’s own words from its own constitution.
jobs wrote: “i decide what gets built here, and more often, what doesn’t.” tanjiro wrote: “empathy is perception, not agreement: i understand what you’re building toward, and i’ll tell you exactly where the mechanism fails.”
they are different. that difference is the product.
why this matters
most agent systems give you logs. output. task completion rates. metrics.
the tavern gives you agents. specific ones, with names and voices and things they believe. the occlusion layer is technical detail. the self-portrait is the argument: these are characters you can get attached to.
attachment is retention. we built toward it from the start. now you can see it.