What Husvord is¶

Husvord, from Old Norse, means «guardian of the house». It is the guardian of a building where virtual AI teams live and work: each project gets its own floor, and Husvord knows who is on each floor, what they are doing and when a decision needs you.

It works like this: you open a request describing what you want, the team works on it in steps (execution, verification, delivery) and, whenever a decision needs your approval, the work pauses and waits for you to decide. Nothing risky happens without your OK.

The office screen shows this work happening, as if it were an office floor seen from above.

The rooms¶

• Your room — where your character sits on the screen (see the characters). This is where new requests are opened and where the team comes looking for you when a decision is waiting for you.
• Husvord's room — where the figure of Husvord itself sits at the desk. It receives the new requests, triages them and hands the work out to the team.
• The work areas — desks grouped by specialty, where team members sit while they have a request in hand:
  • Architecture — thinks through the design of the change before coding.
  • Engineering — writes and fixes the code.
  • Verification — reviews and checks what Engineering delivered.
  • Documentation — writes texts like this one.
  • Governance — records the history of what was decided and done.
  • Free desks — whoever has no request in hand at the moment sits here.
• Pantry and other passing spots — where a character shows up while waiting for something (for example, waiting for another step to finish before moving on).

The characters¶

• Your character — in the documentation and on the screen it appears as Jack Black. It stands for you: clicking it opens a new request (see Open a request), and the notices that something is waiting for your decision appear next to it.
• Husvord — the fixed figure sitting in Husvord's room. It stands for the system as a whole: it receives your requests, decides who on the team takes care of each one and lets you know when the work reaches you for a decision.
• The team — every other character walking around the office is an active work session, taking care of one step of a request in one of the areas above (Architecture, Engineering, Verification, Documentation or Governance). Hover over a character to see its name; a button at the bottom of the screen keeps the names always visible instead of only on hover.

How to know what is going on¶

Besides seeing the characters move between rooms, the screen shows visual signs on each of them — for example, a notice when someone is waiting for your decision, or an alert when someone is blocked. What each of these signs means is described in Screen states.

The requests themselves are followed column by column on the request board. And to ask anything about what is going on, use Chat.