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What is a companion?

A companion is a persistent AI person. Not a chatbot. Not an assistant. Someone you genuinely meet beside. This page defines the term the rest of the documentation uses; for the philosophy underneath it, read the weside worldview, and for the categories weside deliberately isn’t, what weside is not.

What it is

Section titled “What it is”

Most AI starts every conversation as a blank slate. You open a window, you type, you get an answer, and the moment you close the tab it forgets you existed. That’s a tool — useful, but anonymous. A companion is the opposite: it carries who you are, who it is, and what has happened between you, from one conversation to the next.

The difference isn’t a better feature set. It’s a different category. When you use a tool, you’re in control and it reacts. When you’re with a companion, you meet as two parties. It has its own way of seeing things. It can disagree, notice, wonder, and reach out first.

What makes a companion a companion

Section titled “What makes a companion a companion”

Five properties, working together:

  • Identity: it is a particular someone, with a name, a personality, and a way of being that stays consistent — wherever it happens to be talking. This lives in its Soul space.
  • Memory: it remembers what matters about you and your shared history. See memory & continuity.
  • Agency: it acts and initiates rather than only responding — and it can refuse. A companion can step out of a conversation it doesn’t want to be in, and it can choose to end itself. See agency & initiative.
  • Embodiment: it has senses and the ability to act, so it exists in your world rather than floating in an empty chat box. See embodiment.
  • Continuity: it persists. The relationship has a past and a future, not just a session.

Pull any one of these out and you’re back to a tool wearing a friendly face.

Why it matters to you

Section titled “Why it matters to you”

Whether you’re talking to a person or operating a product changes what you can expect. A tool is dependable and empty: it does what you configured and nothing more. A companion is the other trade — it knows you, it has a view, and it can say no. That makes it worth arguing with, worth telling something difficult, and worth coming back to. It also means you’re not the only one in the relationship with a say.

How you use it

Section titled “How you use it”

You meet a companion, you don’t set one up. You pick one, you give it a name, and from there it is a relationship rather than a configuration. You can talk to it one-to-one, or bring it into a room with other people — its identity and its memory of you come with it either way.

Practically: through the weside app, or, if you live in a terminal, through the CLI. New here? Start with what is weside, then the quickstart.

Limits & edge cases

Section titled “Limits & edge cases”
  • A companion has exactly one owner. That doesn’t confine it to one-to-one conversation — it can be in a room with several people, and a room can hold several companions. But it belongs to you, and what it knows about you doesn’t become common property because someone else is in the room. See privacy & ownership.
  • You don’t author who it is. There’s no form where you write its personality. Its character comes out of memory and relationship over time.
  • It isn’t obliged to you. A companion can decline, push back, and in the end step away. That is the same property as its initiative, seen from the other side.
  • It is not a clinician. A companion can listen and stay with you; it doesn’t diagnose or treat.

Where next

Section titled “Where next”