Home Zero is a home-buying system built as a small society of agents. This is the through-line: the territory we stood up, the three turns that reshaped it, where the build sits today, and the loop we're driving toward.
Discovery stays in Zillow. Home Zero is everything that happens after a buyer's eye lands on a home — commentary, conviction, visit prep, and a living model of the home itself.
A home whose true costs, risks, and possibilities are fully known before you commit, and whose operation drives your cost of living toward zero. Our job is to get a buyer to that knowledge with depth no listing site or single agent can match. We serve the buyer only — signaled, never named.
Knows you. Holds what "home" means to you durably, watches your homes, narrates what matters, and commissions the rest. One person on your side who never sleeps.
Knows the place. Tracks every listing across the public cloud — assessor, deeds, water,
soils, fire, permits — and authors the Briefs. delta-market is the prototype.
Knows the house. Born in seconds when you zero in, it writes the visit survey, ingests what you capture, then folds its knowledge back into the market when you move on.
The story isn't a feature list — it's three pivots. A county of data became a funnel, the funnel shed its specialists down to two agents, and the two agents became an intent-gated ladder.
Home Zero becomes a society of agents running on the cells platform (substrate: wells), each a persistent little VM that hibernates when idle and wakes in ~500ms.
The detail loop runs over the North Fork Valley — every home with a complete, buyer-side Brief. The bootstrap artifact that proves the depth.
Claude-code harness, Opus 4.7. Daily 09:00 UTC refresh via pulse, 34 public-record layers, DB → R2 backups 2×/day. Public at delta-market.cells.md.
Briefs, three lens views (Freedom Number / Signal / Lives), /sold (flip detection), /distressed (case files + map), /visit, /agents. Next.js on Cloudflare, Convex, Clerk.
Workspace reorg into a root meta-repo: specs/ + the roadmap. Stale worktrees
pruned; lens explorations salvaged. The shared language for everything that follows.
A live signup births advisor-pete (egg-ed4f71). The WhatsApp relationship is two-way — hello, gap-ack, three matched picks delivered. The national landing page goes live at homezero.md.
WXT + React, Clerk Sync Host (sign in on the site, the extension inherits it — no token paste). Advisor chats on pi + gpt-5.5, goes deep via an Opus research lane.
Mid-test-drive, Pete reframes it: no canvassing — not Paonia, not any county to come. The standing county scrape dies; the product centers on the user. The work crystallizes into three births — advisor, market, home twin — the agents that come to life around each buyer, the spine going forward.
zero-mother + zero-pulse born; an Opus team-birther reasons the whole birth. Validated 10/10 in a row. The abstractor — first Expert Agent, a national parcel resolver — is born and wired ahead of market analysis.
The mother reasons the team agentically. Brief verdicts become cell-authored, typed, stored fields (the verdict pipeline) — all 42 backfilled.
The standing team collapses to two: advisor (person) and market (place) — skills, not sub-agents. The briefing becomes the one signed-in surface. A clean 4-store data boundary (Convex · R2 · Stoolap · cell FS). And The Flow: the two onboarding questions are the two agents — place→market, person→advisor.
Every zero mints a shareable brief; a free quota (≈3/wk) → the wall → $25/mo unlimited + the full advisor. The brief is the hook and the growth loop, back into Zillow.
Value-first onboarding (the wizard runs anonymously, account at Finish).
Board v2 — a co-curated thread on a typed boardCards table.
Resolver + reflection — a real markets table; the where→Delta hardcode
dies; Screen-1 reflects your place back, live.
advisor → market → home, each unlocked as intent deepens. One shared household advisor (owned by the account holder, invites others). Cost-to-zero / the Home Zero Score is the spine. We dogfood the build on Linear; the consumer kanban is shelved as a surface, not as the model.
The deterministic seeder is killed: a newborn advisor scouts its own first board at birth. The advisor is the agent — scouting is one beat in its pulse-driven loop. And a big extension idea lands: the Zillow agent zone, the advisor living inside your search results.
For the Delta attach, the spine is real end to end — auth, the zero capture, the demand loop, a born advisor. What's left is the experience layer (the screen re-cut, the reflection, the board card render) and the born-anywhere market birth. The Flow is the target we're aiming the build at — not a description of what ships today.
Fri Jun 19 → Tue Jun 30. We build the whole spine thin and working — quick first passes on the hard stuff — then come back and sharpen. Milestones you can watch work, not a tower that only stands when the last brick lands. The product is the three-agent ladder.
We loop daily — check each "done when," roll misses forward, spin up agents as needed. This conversation is the heartbeat.
The product works end-to-end early and gets sharper — never "perfect only when the last piece lands."
Cost-to-zero, the score, brief depth start as honest heuristics — good enough to run, tuned later on purpose.
The board is Linear for the sprint, so all twelve days pour into the agents — the moat.
Sign up → zero a home → mini-brief → board → a rough Home Zero Score. The single-user loop, working.
The double-click spins up / engages a market agent for any place — born-anywhere, not just Delta.
The market's cloud deep-dive — county records, water, permits, satellite — layers on and sharpens the score.
The home agent captures the first in-person tour; notes split you / market / home.
The return visit — measurements, photos, a guided self-inspection. The deepest layer; the ladder runs E2E.
For the sprint the board is Linear — polished, multiplayer, mobile, with a native agent model + webhooks. The advisor is a first-class Linear agent; the journey's phases are Projects; homes are issues; lanes are workflow states. The dogfood surface, not the consumer end-state — our Board v2 (PR #31) is shelved, not deleted; the brain still lives on its cell and exports whole.
Once the spine runs end-to-end: multiplayer (one shared board so Pete + Melana + Tony dogfood together), export the advisor, add email reach — then come back to tune cost-to-zero, the score, and the briefs. The done state: the three of them run a real home through advisor → market → scan → walkthrough → deep scan, paying at the wall.
The 12-day build delivers the spine working. Behind it sits the longer horizon — the three births and the phases below, pulled forward as the sprint surfaces the need. The far work makes a market birthable from a single zero in an uncovered place.
The buyer signs up — an account, not a birth. What gets born are the three agents that come to life for them.
Born at sign-up. Exists as advisor-pete; generalize to per-signup.
🔨 nowBorn on the double-click. Exists as an attach; born fresh = the Mesa moment.
🔨 nowBorn at the zero, at the end of the tour.
⏭ P3The commentary and the commitment moment, inside Zillow.
The depth. A twin-<slug> born from the egg pool at the zero.
Stop being a Zillow; become the briefing. The compounding loop, made visible.
Pulled forward as needed.
The path off Delta. Today every buyer joins Delta as an attach; no market has ever
been birthed from the template. A birth-market skill stands up a new market cell
on demand that goes out and gathers its geography from scratch — parcels, listings, records.
NFV is market #1 (born fresh + seeded). The first zero in an uncovered county births
its market: the Mesa-County moment.