the runtime-agnostic stack that plugs any agent brain into an autonomous content-creation loop. generative tools, channels, hosting, and legal provenance — wired by default.
effigy grew out of a question. every team building autonomous AI personas in 2026 was rebuilding the same pipeline from scratch — LoRA training, voice rules, channel wiring, provenance signing, hosting — one character at a time, one runtime at a time, one mistake at a time. nothing tied it together.
we built kira first. a single character, end-to-end, at $60-75/mo all-in. she still runs today. every brittle edge and expensive lesson on the way to her became a rule, a linter, a skill.
effigy takes that pipeline and makes it runtime-agnostic. bring your brain — hermes, langgraph, crewai, whatever comes next. we wire the loop, the tools, the channels, the legal layer. one click becomes a deployed autonomous presence.
effigy (n.): a crafted likeness that stands in for someone else and speaks on their behalf. historically sculpted; lately software.
our customers build effigies — synthetic presences that carry their brand, their voice, and their posture into channels where they cannot be. the effigy is not the person. the effigy is a disclosed, provenance-signed extension of the person, operating inside rules they set.
this is the distinction that matters. not impersonation. representation.
every artifact ships signed. every agent declares itself. every brand we touch gets a takedown SOP on day one. compliance is not a tax — it's the product.
the user should not have to pick a framework to get a working agent. the platform makes the framework invisible. swap hermes for langgraph in one config line.
prompt linters, voice-check gates, C2PA manifests, moderation queues. the boring disciplines compound. we will not ship a half-baked loop and call it "in beta."
the common agent interface is a thin, opinionated abstraction — not a lowest-common-denominator. framework-specific power is available through explicit escape hatches, never by accident.
C2PA signing, FTC disclosure, takedown SOP, GDPR consent — all built in, all default on. the projects that get killed by regulation are the ones that added it last.
a persona is a locked LoRA, a loaded SOUL, a linter that knows the character's anchors. the character stops being a vibe and becomes a reproducible artifact.
exposed rules, visible rulers, monospace metadata, version stamps. the guide, the product, the agent — all declare themselves. no slick opacity over empty machinery.
tech-min clarity leads, brutalist edge earns it. we are not notion. we are not stripe. we are linear with are.na's bones.
the upper-right quadrant — runtime-agnostic AND compliance-first — was empty. everyone else either locks you into one framework or treats provenance as an afterthought.
"the upper-right quadrant was empty. that's where we built."
"the CAI spec has 11 ops. MCP is the tool protocol. adapters declare their surface."
"you brought a brain. we'll handle the rest. take a minute to name your first effigy."
"every "AI influencer" project fails for the same three reasons. we wrote them down."
head · body · lower with 4-unit gaps. the mark encodes the product: agents assembled from distinct parts, cast from a source, offset on the record.effigy. jetbrains mono 800 (berkeley mono at ship). tracking -0.065em at display, -0.045em at body. never tracked wider than 0.e in jetbrains mono 800. small-size fallback only — favicon, app icon, timeline avatar, sidebar nav ≤40px. never replaces the logomark at hero scale.-0.03em to -0.04em. body: 0. mono logo: -0.065em. mono small: 0.02em. uppercase mono metadata: 0.1em to 0.14em.effigy wordmark + tone-of-voice editorial moments. uppercase ONLY for 10–12px mono metadata with ≥0.1em tracking. never all-caps display type.effigy.). em-dashes for in-prose emphasis. mono-label metadata uses · (middle dot) separator or —, never | or /.font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums) for any data / counters / price / metric. proportional elsewhere.1× cap-height on all sides. Nothing crosses the cap-line or drops below the accent rule.#F5F7FF default. Ink #0A1230 reversed. Narwhal #78A7FF emphasis only. Never other colors.every image and video the platform produces carries a C2PA manifest — synthetic origin, training source, model, creator, takedown contact. the badge appears everywhere the work does. unverifiable means unshipped.
every SOUL document is paired with a two-gate voice check — lexical linter (banned words, register drift) + semantic judge (grok evaluates whether the draft matches the archetype). nothing ships without passing both.
no image leaves the pipeline without the identity linter passing — trigger word present, distinctive-feature anchors intact, mode-appropriate framing, banned styling words absent. hard-block on violation. identity does not drift.
every brand's voice ships as both a readable SOUL.md and a machine-readable JSON export. LLM routing, voice-check grok judges, quality audits — all consume the structured form. no prose parsing.
{
"archetype": "confident",
"registers": { "confident": 0.6, "technical": 0.2, "warm": 0.15, "irreverent": 0.05 },
"banned": ["revolutionary", "empowers", "bro"],
"tics": ["precise, with teeth", "bring your brain"],
"length_target": { "min": 80, "max": 240, "p50": 140 }
}
founders review voice-check reject patterns + updates any drift-prone rules. takes 20 minutes.
full guide audit. every section revisited, every rule tested against the last 90 days of real artifacts. new version shipped.
brand-voice writer review. major version bump if positioning, audience, or aesthetic shifts materially.