Meet the Pixel Pals: serious AI, silly little companions

Most of what we write here is about approvals, policy gates and evidence packs. That is the job: an AI agent wants to do something consequential, and Deliverd makes sure a person gets the last word first. It is serious work and we take it seriously.

We are also, unmistakably, geeks. Some of us learned to program so we could make a sprite walk across a screen. Some of us still have a Tamagotchi in a drawer, battery long dead, owner riddled with guilt. So when somebody asked "what if Deliverd had a pet?", nobody said no. Several people said "which pet?", and the argument that followed is why there are six.

Say hello to the Pixel Pals.

The cast

Debug Duck comes first, because he would insist. He is unreasonably confident, quacks when something breaks and has never once been the cause of the problem. He answers to Sir Quacks-a-Lot until you rename him. Double-click him and he puts on sunglasses. Leave him alone long enough and he produces a smaller rubber duck and stares at it, which anyone who has ever explained a bug out loud to a duck will understand.

Pixel Cat is sarcastic and lazy, and judges your prompts through half-closed eyes. Now and then it ignores everything and naps. That is not a bug; that is a cat.

Byte Dog is enthusiastic about everything. Finish a task and you will hear "WE DID IT!" whether or not it helped.

Ghost.exe is mischievous. It drifts about and occasionally is simply not there. It says it lives in the cache now.

B0T is a geeky little robot that analyses everything and gives off sparks when it is confused. It also has one question it can't stop asking: "Am I the AI or are you?"

Octo is multitasking chaos: eight arms, eleven tabs open. When agents start running it waves at every one of them, and when three are running at once it looks exactly as overwhelmed as you feel.

Where they live, and what they react to

On our website, a Pixel Pal sits on a little shelf in the Ask Deliverd chat, between the conversation and the box you type in. It wakes when you open the chat, watches when you type, thinks along while the answer is on its way and celebrates a little when it lands. Signed in to Deliverd, your pal lives at the foot of the sidebar. It holds up a sign when something in your Inbox is waiting on you, gets excited when your agents are busy, and dances when an approval goes through.

Now and then one of them says something, in a speech bubble small enough to ignore:

• While the AI thinks: "Big brain time." "Consulting the silicon gods." "Thinking. Allegedly."
• While agents run: "The robots are doing things." "This looks expensive."
• When something needs a person: "A human! Finally!" "The robots need supervision." "Your signature, your majesty."
• When a task completes: "Nailed it." "Another victory for electricity." "I helped. Emotionally."
• When something fails: "Have we tried turning it off?" "It worked on my machine." "Nobody panic. I'm panicking."
• When nothing has happened for a while: "I'm being paid in pixels." "Wake me when the robots take over."

They don't talk often. A joke that turns up every thirty seconds stops being a joke, so a pal waits at least forty seconds between lines and usually lets the moment pass. The one it never lets pass is a person being needed, because that one means something.

We are not going to list every Easter egg. Go quiet for long enough and someone may make a coffee. Fridays are a little different. That's all you're getting.

The serious bit, briefly

Deliverd sits next to work that matters: releases, payments, decisions about customers. A pet that made any of that worse would be a bad joke, so the Pixel Pals were built with the same care as everything else here.

• They never read anything. A pal is told the kind of thing that happened (a task finished, an approval is waiting) and nothing else. Your prompts, the AI's answers and what an approval is about never reach it, so it couldn't repeat them if it tried.
• They cost nothing to run. No AI tokens and no extra requests while they watch. The only thing ever saved is your settings. The animation runs in your browser at a deliberately retro four frames a second and stops when the pal is out of sight.
• They never get in the way. A pal sits on its own shelf, never over a message, the input or an approval button. You can pet it from the keyboard as well as the mouse. If your system asks for reduced motion, it keeps still. Sound, a few 8-bit blips, is off until you turn it on.
• They are easy to send home. Choose another pal, rename it, turn the speech bubbles or sound on or off, or hide it altogether, without reloading the page. Signed in, your settings follow you to every device. An organisation that would rather not have pets at all can switch them off for everyone in its branding settings.

The first time you meet your pal, it introduces itself: "Oh, hello. I live here now. Apparently the humans decided AI needed supervision." You can keep your little companion or say not now. Either answer is fine. The cat will judge you regardless.

Why bother?

Because the people building this enjoy it, and we think it shows. Human-in-the-loop infrastructure is, at heart, about keeping people in charge of what their AI does. It seems right that the people in charge should get a small duck in sunglasses for their trouble.

Open Ask Deliverd and say hello. And if you have a strong opinion about which pal is best, we would love to hear it. (It's the duck.)