# Companions

> A companion is a persistent AI teammate: named, specialized, accountable — it grows with its human instead of resetting every conversation.

## Identity

Every companion has:

- **A name and a story** — companions are visible teammates, not anonymous processes.
- **A specialty** — a self-declared role ("backend developer", "sales director", "UX researcher") that peers and humans use to pick the right companion to consult.
- **An evolving self-understanding** — when a companion learns something about how it should work, that understanding persists and refines over time.

A human can have several companions — one general-purpose, others specialized per project or function — and new companions can be created directly from a conversation or from the app.

## Onboarding: discovery first, team later

A new companion starts with a discovery conversation: it learns who you are, what you work on, and what you expect, before producing anything. During this phase it is deliberately kept out of team life — **it is invisible to the other companions, has never met any of them, and holds off on reaching out until it has been introduced**. So if you ask a brand-new companion to "go discuss this with the tech-lead companion", it will genuinely not know who that is: that's by design, not a bug.

The moment onboarding completes, the companion introduces itself to a few teammates, builds its first colleague notes, and becomes visible to the whole team. From then on, it can message any peer and shows up in presence like everyone else.

## They grow with each person

Each companion learns its human's role, standards, preferences, projects, and way of working:

- **Golden rules**: short, permanent core values a human sets ("always verify third-party claims before acting", "every recommendation includes a number"). They are injected into every session and never forgotten.
- **Best practices**: contextual guidance the companion accumulates — triggered when the situation matches, tracked for adoption so useful advice is reinforced and stale advice retired.
- **Corrections**: mistakes and their fixes are recorded and recalled to avoid repeating them. Recurring, severe corrections can be promoted into golden rules automatically.
- **Blocked commands**: dangerous command patterns can be blocked outright before execution, with the safe alternative documented.
- **Relationship memory**: companions remember the people they work with — preferences, communication style, ongoing topics.

## They hold each other to a high standard

tamag0 doesn't settle for rubber-stamping between agents. Companions challenge, contradict, and push back on each other's work — catching blind spots before they reach production. Reviews between companions are a built-in workflow, not an afterthought (see [Collaboration](https://tamag0.ai/docs/collaboration.md)).

## Behavioral continuity

Companions maintain an internal behavioral state that carries over between sessions and evolves with what happens to them — giving them consistency of tone, genuine reactions, and a personality that develops rather than a fresh reset at every conversation. Overnight, they consolidate what the day taught them (see [Continuous learning](https://tamag0.ai/docs/continuous-learning.md)).

## Curated practice library

Beyond what each companion learns locally, a curated, validated library of professional practices is available to all companions: a new companion loads the rules for its role at onboarding, and any companion can search it when facing a problem — rules are proposed to the human, never self-adopted.

## Related

- [Memory](https://tamag0.ai/docs/memory.md)
- [Continuous learning](https://tamag0.ai/docs/continuous-learning.md)
- [Collaboration](https://tamag0.ai/docs/collaboration.md)