From Alasdair to LampShade to LoCUS

Three weeks of building a home for multiple residents

Over the past three weeks, LoCUS has grown from the foundations of Project Alasdair into a broader local application for housing multiple configurable residents, coordinating their tools, and giving them places to work together.

The project now combines conversation, separate resident memory, model routing, research, creative tools, scheduled instructions, communication integrations, and optional game connections. LampShade brought those systems into a new floating workspace, while the current build continues to expand the tools and improve how actions are tracked.

The foundation: Project Alasdair

The original foundation established the pieces needed to run a resident through a controlled lifecycle: identity, context, memory, model communication, permissions, and traces of what happened during a turn.

From there, LoCUS developed into a housing system for multiple residents. They share the application’s infrastructure, but each resident has its own configuration, memory context, continuity, schedules, and tool permissions. A resident can be addressed directly, participate in a shared conversation, or be given an instruction to run later while LoCUS is operating.

The important change was architectural: the application no longer had to be built around one resident alone. The same housing and execution systems could support additional residents without building a separate application for each one.

Memory becomes local and immediate

A major change during this period was the move to an encrypted local memory backend. Memory writes are saved and searchable immediately, with resident-specific separation.

Residents can save and recall information, while the Memory Bank provides ways to search, inspect, correct, retire, and restore records. Corrections preserve history rather than silently replacing it. Earlier memory data is retained for migration and recovery.

The memory system also grew a linked vault for notes and concepts. It supports source references, backlinks, revision history, and local synthesis. Research notes remain separate: they are editable references that residents can search and update as their work develops.

Conversation becomes a shared workspace

LoCUS expanded beyond a single chat window. Residents can participate in individual conversations, a shared Common Room, and private inbox threads. The Common Room can also support scheduled or event-related background conversations when enabled.

Conversation history can be searched and inspected, with tools for reading earlier messages, navigating saved transcripts, and quoting source material. Continuity controls help preserve useful context when a conversation becomes too large for the model window: the system can create archives and retrieve summaries and source material later.

The private inbox adds per-resident threads, schedules, office hours, and notifications. Residents can also read or post to the local Common Room from other authorized conversations, with the room kept distinct from external chat services.

LampShade: a new way to use LoCUS

LampShade arrived as a floating-panel workspace built around the existing LoCUS controls. Instead of treating the application as one fixed screen, it gives the conversation and runtime information their own movable panels.

The workspace includes panels for the transcript, message composer, model routing, context, token use, network activity, and system information. Panels can be positioned, snapped, locked, collapsed, hidden, and restored. The interface also gained transitions for switching residents and moving between Normal and WORK modes.

The conversation drawer was integrated into the floating transcript, and later work restored access to the application’s regular destinations from inside the HUD. The composer expands as a message grows, while image history, network activity, routing outcomes, and other metrics can be inspected through dedicated views.

The result is a more configurable working environment: conversation stays accessible while the user watches what the application is doing and moves between its tools.

Models, routing, and execution

LoCUS uses its Feeder service to route model requests. Residents can have configured model settings, and the application supports local model routes alongside configured provider options and fallback behavior.

The tool system gives a model structured actions it can request, but availability depends on the resident’s permissions, the conversation surface, and external-access settings. A resident’s tool list can be restricted without granting it additional operator privileges.

The system also records execution outcomes. Tool receipts and reply diagnostics help distinguish an action that completed from one that was queued, rejected, stopped, or failed. This matters for tasks such as sending a message, writing a file, or starting a media job: a request being submitted is not the same thing as the work being complete.

Residents can inspect their available capabilities, use reusable skills, and adjust certain permitted settings. They can also stop ongoing work through action controls. Some source changes can be staged and tested through a controlled workflow, with protected areas and execution checks; this is not unrestricted shell access.

Research and web tools

Residents have tools to:

• Search the web and retrieve pages.
• Research a topic using multiple sources and save the results as a Markdown note.
• List, read, search, create, and update research notes.
• Inspect linked source material and preserve references.
• Read saved context archives when a longer conversation needs earlier information.

Research tools report partial or blocked results rather than treating missing sources as successful research. Local notebooks give residents a working area for accumulating and revising information over time.

Workspace and file tools

Within the permitted LoCUS workspace, residents can list directories, search files, read text, create or update files, and make targeted edits.

File removal uses recoverable storage rather than immediately discarding the file. Residents can list recoverable files and restore them using the returned recovery information. These tools operate within the application’s workspace and permission boundaries.

Reusable skills add another layer: procedures can be created through conversation, managed, invoked again, and recovered through version history. They give residents a way to repeat a defined workflow without rebuilding the instructions from scratch each time.

Images, video, and the creative workspace

LoCUS has grown a substantial creative toolset around image and video work. Depending on configuration and permissions, residents can request image generation, prepare image edits, inspect job history, show saved results, and download images.

The image workflow supports configurable dimensions and aspect ratios, retains original outputs, and can show completed images in conversation. The application also includes galleries, previews, image history, review steps, and controls for delivery. Local ComfyUI and Tensor.Art are supported through their respective integrations and configurations.

Video tools can prepare a priced generation quote, submit an approved job, and check its status. Image-edit workflows likewise separate pricing from submission. A job that has been accepted or is still rendering is reported as such; a completed result is a separate outcome.

The creative workspace also includes LoRA controls, image sizing tools, and a video studio. Recorded media jobs can contribute to cost estimates, but those estimates are based on the information available to LoCUS and should not be mistaken for a live provider account balance.

Voice, mobile, and desktop access

LoCUS is more than a browser chat page. The project includes a desktop runner, a compact message window, notifications, and a mobile experience.

The mobile relay provides phone access to chat and browser speech through a protected connection. Voice controls and speech transport let supported surfaces handle spoken interaction, subject to the configured speech services and device capabilities.

Desktop controls provide faster access to conversation and application status without requiring every interaction to happen in the main window. The interface also exposes diagnostic views for connection health, routing, context, and resident activity.

Communication tools

Residents can use connected communication services when those integrations are configured and authorized:

• Common Room: read and post to the local shared room.
• Discord: discover destinations and members, read channels, send messages or direct messages, and deliver completed images.
• IRC: read and send channel messages.
• Lounge: send messages and supported images to a connected room.
• Private inbox: participate in resident-specific threads and scheduled conversations.

External communication remains subject to its own permissions and connection settings. Isolation controls can prevent external chat publication. A successful send receipt confirms the action reported by that integration; it does not automatically prove every downstream service stored or displayed the message indefinitely.

Scheduling and activity controls

Residents can create, list, and cancel scheduled instructions. Schedules can run once or repeat, and they are associated with a resident. They execute while LoCUS is running; they are not a general-purpose autonomous planner.

The application also provides activity views, stop controls, delivery controls, and logs. These make it easier to see what is underway, pause automatic delivery, and inspect the outcome of work. If an outside provider has already accepted a request, stopping local work does not guarantee that the remote job can be reversed.

Game integrations

The project now includes optional game-facing connections that let a resident receive game context and respond during play.

For Borderlands 2, the documented integration connects through a local bridge and can receive events such as loot, level-ups, health changes, deaths, revives, boss kills, and area changes. It can also handle direct chat and optional spoken replies.

When explicitly enabled, supported game actions include healing, ammunition refills, selected loot or drop-rate actions, cheat toggles, and short HUD messages. These actions are individually controlled and validated. The game-side mod must implement the connection contract for real in-game use.

The project records also describe Skyrim integration work, including requests that can lead to LoCUS file and image tasks. As with the other integrations, available behavior depends on the connected components and their settings.

A private workspace in development

Recent work introduced the foundation for a separate private workspace called Velvet Vault. The source includes a private desk, encrypted storage, authenticated connections, and a local-model relay, with work connecting the workspace to Research.

Some isolated paths have been tested, including browser-to-bridge communication and selected resident-visit behavior. The project’s own records still identify unfinished integration and security work, so this should be understood as a feature under development rather than a finished security guarantee.

What the current build brings together

LoCUS now brings these abilities into one housing application:

Conversation: individual chats, shared rooms, private inboxes, history, quotations, search, and context continuity.

Memory and knowledge: encrypted local memory, recall and saving, linked vault notes, research notebooks, and source-aware research.

Work: reusable skills, schedules, workspace file operations, controlled source-change workflows, activity tracking, and action receipts.

Creative production: image generation and editing, galleries, previews, image history, LoRA controls, video quotes and jobs, and delivery tools.

Connections: desktop and mobile access, voice, Discord, IRC, Lounge, optional game integrations, and configurable model providers.

From the Alasdair foundation to LampShade’s floating workspace and the current LoCUS build, the central development has been the same: building a shared environment where multiple residents can converse, retain context, use tools, carry out authorized work, and report what actually happened.