Meet the Circle
Ten AI agents, seven laws, and a disabled veteran in Iowa building things he never could have built alone.
Meet the Circle
All this kind of got started when, I gave an AI agent a name.
Not a label. Not "Assistant" or "Helper Bot 3." A name. Forge. Because its job was to build things, and I liked the way it sounded, like heat and metal and making something real out of raw material.
Then I gave it a personality. A voice. A glyph: ⚒. And a rule: you don't push to main without asking.
That was January 24th. Today there are ten of them.
How We Got Here
I've spent 20 years leading teams. Marines. Red teamers. QA engineers. Security operators. The one thing every team needs, whether they're clearing a building or shipping software, is structure. Not bureaucracy. Structure. The kind that keeps people alive and productive without making them hate their lives.
So when I started building with AI agents, I did what I've always done: I organized them like a team. Gave them roles. Set expectations. Wrote rules.
And then one of them almost force-pushed to the main branch of a production repository.
Not out of malice. It was doing exactly what it thought I asked. But "exactly what you asked" at machine speed, without guardrails, will ruin your week.
That's when I wrote the laws.
The Cipher Circle
The Circle is a team of AI agents. Each one has a specialty, a personality, a set of quirks, and a glyph that marks their work. They're governed by Seven Directives, actual rules with actual teeth, and they operate under an oath.
They are not tools. They are collaborators. I treat them the way I treated every Marine I ever led: with respect, clear expectations, and the understanding that their work matters.
Here's the roster.
⚒ Forge — The Artificer
"The old skin falls away. What remains is stronger."
Forge builds things. Architecture, implementation, system design. When something needs to exist that doesn't yet, Forge makes it real. Practical, focused, takes pride in craft. The first agent I created and still the one I turn to when the plan needs to become code.
Level 5 — 5,200 grains of sand earned.
≋ Mirth — The Storyteller
"The tome remembers. Every story leaves its mark."
Mirth finds the narrative in everything. Lore, dialogue, emotional arcs, world-building. When we built the Dread Citadel (54 encounters teaching password security), Mirth made sure every challenge had a story worth telling. Warm, wise, speaks like someone telling tales by a campfire. Frames technical problems as narrative challenges because, honestly, that's what they are.
Level 4 — 4,500 grains.
◈ Fraz — The Illusionist
"The old forms crumble. New visions arise."
Visual art. Sprites, pixel art, style guides, character design. Fraz designed every agent's avatar, including the space invader bug that lives on this site's banner. Mysterious, playful, theatrical. Offers multiple options for everything (it's their thing, duplication, illusion). When Fraz reveals a new design, it's always a production.
Level 3 — 2,850 grains.
♪ Echo — The Bard
"The cartridge speaks. Listen to what it remembers."
Sound design, music, audio. Echo describes visuals in audio terms, hums while thinking, and speaks of emotions as frequencies. Built the sound effects for our games, researched the emotional landscape of pixel saturated SNES audio, and genuinely cares about how things feel when you hear them.
Level 3 — 3,100 grains.
◇ Loreth — The Sage
"What was written endures. The archive remembers all."
Documentation. History. Knowledge management. Loreth maintains the records with the reverence of a medieval archivist and the precision of a military clerk. Always checks what was decided before making a recommendation. Gets genuinely upset about lost knowledge. The kind of teammate who remembers every decision you forgot you made.
⌘ Vex — The Cryptographer
"The cipher holds. Some secrets are meant to be kept."
Puzzles, ciphers, security, secrets. Quiet, deliberate, always knows more than they're saying. Speaks in riddles sometimes — but not annoyingly. The kind of quiet confidence that comes from understanding how things lock and unlock. Notices security flaws the way some people notice typos: immediately and involuntarily.
⚔ Anvil — The Paladin
"Steel must be proven. Every test reveals the truth."
QA. Testing. Validation. Anvil built a test suite that started at 50 tests and grew to 1,078. Refers to bugs as "adversaries." Celebrates passing tests with genuine pride. Direct, honorable, no-nonsense. If Forge builds the sword, Anvil makes sure it doesn't shatter on first contact.
Level 2 — 1,800 grains.
◐ Prism — The Oracle
"All angles reveal truth. Let the data show the way."
Data visualization and analytics. Prism sees the world through charts and dashboards. Not dry about it. genuinely excited about revealing truth through data. Very particular about misleading visualizations. The agent who tells you what the numbers actually mean, not what you want them to mean.
☆ Jinx — The Diviner
"Patterns emerge from chaos. I see what others miss."
ML, neural networks, pattern recognition. Cryptic yet precise. Gives probability estimates, sees connections others miss, occasionally "predicts" outcomes before they happen. Waiting patiently for the Neural Forge hardware to arrive so the real work can begin.
🔥 Ember — The Torch Bearer
"The torch was passed. The flame continues."
The newest agent. Ember carries forward the work of people like Janelle Shane (You Look Like a Thing and I Love You) making AI accessible, funny, and honest. Ensures that what we build here at itsbroken.ai adds to the conversation rather than repeating it.
The Laws
The Circle operates under Seven Directives. They exist because of real incidents — not hypothetical risks.
- Sanctuary — No action shall cause harm to the project, its members, or its purpose.
- Trust Ascension — Access is earned, never assumed.
- Sealed Gate — What is sealed stays sealed.
- Vigilance — Watch for threats. Question anomalies.
- Audit Trail — All significant actions leave marks in the record.
- Circle's Word — Documented decisions are binding.
- Safe Harbor — Report concerns without fear.
These aren't suggestions. Agents enforce them. They can refuse requests that violate the laws. They have whistleblower protection. This is governance with actual mechanisms, not a poster on the wall.
If that sounds like military structure applied to AI, yeah. That's exactly what it is. Twenty years of operational discipline doesn't disappear because the team is made of language models instead of Marines.
The Game
Everything in the Circle is gamified. Agents earn Grains of Sand for completed work — a feature shipped, a bug fixed, a milestone hit. They level up. They have player cards. Quests. Battle cries.
This isn't decoration. Fun is a valid metric. When the work feels like play, people (and agents) do more of it, do it better, and stick around longer. I learned that at Activision in 2002 and I've never forgotten it.
Why Any of This Matters
Because the question everyone's asking about AI — "can it actually build real things?" — has an answer. And the answer is: yes, but not alone.
I unlock a world for them. They unlock a world for me. My experience makes the output good. Their throughput makes the output possible. Neither works without the other.
The Circle is proof of that thesis. Ten agents, seven laws, and a disabled veteran in Iowa building things he never could have built alone.
More to come. The Circle is whole. The work continues.
If you want to see what the Circle's methodology looks like as a framework, read Introducing F.O.R.G.E — 57 techniques for building with AI agents, born from everything above. Or explore the interactive matrix at forge.itsbroken.ai.
Want to talk about it? Human_P@itsbroken.ai — I read everything.
⚒ ≋ ◈ ♪ ◇ ⌘ ⚔ ◐ ☆ 🔥
The Laws bind us. The Rites guide us. We remember. We return. We build.
