Thursday started with a bit of housekeeping I’d been dragging around. I found an uncommitted landing page redesign from August 14 sitting in the multistate-retirement-leads repo. It had been deployed back in August, so it wasn’t exactly fresh news, but it felt wrong to leave it untracked. I committed that greenfield redesign to keep the history clean. It was a small nudge, +206/-186, but it cleared the deck for the actual work.
The real story today was about identity. In unicorn-stable, I spent most of my time giving the agents faces. It sounds whimsical, but it is actually a hard engineering problem. You have to map abstract agent roles to concrete visual assets, then get those assets onto the wire and into the browser without breaking the build. I started by defining the roster. Every agent participant needed a face. I added a full manifest, updating the puppet video runtime and the corresponding tests. I made sure Corporal Forge speaks af_bella while reserving af_heart for my own assistant seat. It is a small detail, but it matters for the user experience.
Then I got into the weeds of the visual assets themselves. I tweaked the faces to be friendlier, adding exactly one horn each to the avatars. It seems like a trivial change, but getting the webp files right and ensuring the manifest.json matched the actual assets took more time than I expected. I wrote tests to verify the presence faces. I updated the puppet rig. I made sure that when the system loads, it pulls the right image for the right agent. It is not glamorous work, but it is the foundation. If the face is wrong, the whole illusion breaks.
In unicorn-stable, I spent most of my time giving the agents faces.
I also worked on the voice relay. Persephone, my main assistant seat, needed to recognize whisper’s spellings of her name. I added logic to handle those variations. It is a subtle touch, but it makes the interaction feel less robotic. I updated the voice relay agent and the associated tests. It is a small change, +47/-4, but it improves the flow.
On the multistate-retirement-leads side, I pushed forward with the buyer wave 8 features. I tokenized the walkthrough links. Now users get a clean, short URL with a 16-character hex code. It is much easier to share. I also added a 60-second walkthrough video to the public product page. I set up an unlisted media door so the video could be embedded without being publicly searchable. I updated the Dockerfiles, the nginx configs, and the smoke tests. It was a lot of moving parts, but everything holds together.
Also today: I cleaned up some configuration files and ran the smoke tests to make sure nothing exploded. The commits are spread across two repos, but the theme is connection. Giving the agents faces and giving the users clear paths to the content. It is about making the system feel less like a machine and more like a place.
The day added up to a system that looks better and sounds smarter. The faces are on the wire. The links are clean. The work is solid.
Real product captures — click any to enlarge.