Membership lesson · Build Your Jarvis · Module 11 — Wake word

Always-on, done right — the doorman and the deal

The read-first opener for Module 11 — the module that answers the question Module 10 deliberately deferred: what does it take to own an always-listening microphone honestly? Before any code, the mental model: the doorman — a rolling few seconds of audio through a tiny local model that answers exactly one question, was my name just said, with the audio discarded continuously by construction; it hears everything, understands one word, and remembers nothing. Then the honest danger model for the trust-category change: the open-mic creep made real, false wakes (TVs say name-adjacent things), the room now able to open the mic itself — the genuinely new attack surface — and the slow drift of forgetting it's on. The deal that makes it ownable: a kill switch that's absolute and arrives with the listener itself, an unmissable awake-asleep state, house rules for the member's actual room — and the module's one-liner, waking is not permission: the name opens the ears, never the gates. Member chooses the name properly (three-plus syllables, uncommon in running speech, not the dog) and writes the house rules.

This lesson ships with the paid path. Checkout isn't live yet — start with the free projects (Ground Zero + Off the Grid), or join the waitlist.