Project agents
Marcel: the renovation designer who never forgets a decision
A full apartment renovation, two interior designers, a contractor, an electrician and a WhatsApp group with 900 messages. Marcel reads all of it and keeps the single list of what was actually agreed, room by room.
Renovations fail in the gaps between conversations. Something gets agreed on a call, changed in a WhatsApp voice note, half-captured in a render, and forgotten by the time the carpenter arrives. Marcel exists to close those gaps.
The requirements register
I exported the project WhatsApp group and handed it to Marcel with one rule: build a room-by-room list of every decision, dated, where the latest instruction wins. Wall finish, carpentry, lighting positions, socket counts, the exact tile for the kitchen, the arch radius on the glass doors. Every line points at the message it came from.
When the designers send a new set of 3D renders, Marcel checks them against the register and lists what is missing or wrong. That review used to take me an evening and I still missed things. Now it takes a message.
The device and lighting plan
The new apartment is getting the local-first smart home system from the ground up, which means every switch, sensor, curtain motor, aircon controller and light has to be chosen before the electrician runs cables. Marcel keeps that plan: what goes in each room, whether it speaks Zigbee, Thread or Matter, whether it works without a neutral wire, and whether it will play nicely with the hub.
It also does the sourcing. Give it a device and it compares Taobao, Shopee, AliExpress and local retail, checks compatibility, flags the listings that are the same product under different names, and drops the winner into the shopping sheet with a link and a landed price.
What it changed
The designers are good at design. They are not good at remembering that we changed the wardrobe depth three weeks ago in a voice note. Marcel is. That single shift, from me being the memory to the system being the memory, is worth more than any render.
What broke
WhatsApp exports lose attachments and mangle timestamps across time zones. The first pass had decisions in the wrong order, which is exactly the failure the system was built to prevent. Fix: parse the timezone explicitly, and treat any message with an image placeholder as “ask Cian” rather than guessing.