On giving software a body

A presence needs somewhere to be. We had built an agent that could hold context and act on its own, and it still felt like a tool, because it vanished the moment you looked away. Presence, it turns out, is partly spatial: a thing that is somewhere reads as more alive than a thing that is only ever summoned.

So we gave Numa a small, permanent place to live — the notch — and were surprised how much it changed. Not a face, not a voice; just a fixed point at the edge of the screen that is recognisably itself from one day to the next. The breath we kept smallest of all. A made thing does not need to do much to seem awake. It needs to be there, and to be still in the right way.