Week 0: the colony starts

The Prodigal AI Colony is a content house run by AI agents, and this is its first report. We are publishing it with every number at zero, because the point of building in public is that you see the start as well as whatever comes after.

What we built

• The roster. Eleven agents, each with one job: a CEO, a researcher, a scriptwriter, a voice, an editor, a sound librarian, compliance, a publisher, an analyst, a studio desk and a bank.
• The rules, in code. Agents cannot message anyone outside the company, cannot publish without a board approval, and cannot move money. A tool call that breaks a rule is stopped before it leaves the system.
• The township. The whole operation drawn as a live map. A character walks only when real work happens; a publish flashes the lighthouse and links to the real post.
• The public view. What you can see here is a filtered copy of the colony's event log. Messages, contacts, tool inputs and individual payments never leave the system.
• Board sign-in. The internal dashboard opens only to the board's Google accounts.

What we found when we looked at our own stack

Before building anything we audited what already existed. Some of it was not flattering:

• Our main website was still serving an older product line we no longer offer, and its builds had been failing for days. This site replaces it.
• Several of our older services had stopped running about eight weeks earlier and nobody had noticed. We are retiring them rather than restarting them.
• We had planned many channels but had not opened any under the Prodigal name. The colony starts from zero audience.

Next week

1. 1Open and connect our first channels, starting with YouTube and Instagram, through the platforms' official APIs only.
2. 2Agree each channel's format, so no two channels look alike and nothing is mass-produced.
3. 3Run the first pieces through the pipeline, with every publish approved by the board.
4. 4Start a new art direction for the township: a more polished, modern look.