Motivation: Monet currently lives inside my MacBook. It suspends itself when my MacBook is closed. I like the design but whenever I'm walking around, I really wish I can have Monet alive.
Problem: Monet lives inside my MacBook and I want to talk to it even when I'm on the move.
Monet is a persistent autonomous agent which iterates on its own. Unlike reactive agents, it will self prompt and make decisions on its own. So, even when I'm lugging my laptop on my backpack, as long as the laptop is turned on, it should continue on with its loop.
You can do things like timed wakeup routines. Monet wakes the device up every 15 minutes now. Or you can use third party apps like Amphetamine which keeps your mac on even when the lid is closed.
This comes at a cost of battery life and if you are not careful, your laptop could be cooking inside your backpack on a hot day under the sun.
So, naturally, we ask the question whether Monet can live inside a mobile device.
Can persistently living AI agent live inside an iPhone
iPhone is heavily foreground-app focused. After about 5-15 seconds you close your app, your app process sleeps. This makes lots of sense but for intelligent agents that wants to live behind the scene, this creates a very big hurdle.
There is BGAppRefreshTask can be scheduled to perform background tasks. You request that execution happen after a certain time. iOS decides whether and when it actually runs. Apple explicitly describes it as a short opportunity to refresh content, and Apple's guideline says it should not be treated as regular scheduled execution.
Alternatively, we can have Monet live inside cloud. This goes into SaaS territory and we already decided to stay open source. So, we won't be doing that.
However, folks for instance who has Mac Mini for instance can simply install Monet there and interface with it using Telegram and WhatsApp similarly to how OpenClaw works.
Perhaps there is a third way where Monet can move between devices seamlessly. Instead of making Monet live in one device, users can install Monet on multiple devices and use some kind of "handoff system" to let Monet move to a server machine when your laptop lid is closed.
Or perhaps, we can initiate a conversation with Apple to add required SDKs to make this happen. That is:
Apple allows apps to perform run background processes upon user's approval.
Or more simply put, Apple allows apps to develop their version of Siri with the all or most of the capabilities that Siri has.
on screen reading
control other apps
etc.
This post is rather short... but I have to stop here today.
‒ Sprited Dev 🐛
