Building Blocks

A world holds two different things. One is its content, meaning the actual people, places and events you have recorded. The other is the structure underneath, which decides what sorts of things the world can hold at all and what it remembers about each of them. Building Blocks is where you shape that structure.

You will find it under World Settings → Building Blocks, and only a world’s owner can open it.

Your AI still does the writing. You add and change the contents of a world by talking to a connected AI tool, and Building Blocks does not change that. What it gives you is control over the mould your AI works to. When you mention a new colleague, the building blocks are what decide that the colleague is filed as a Person, that a Person can record an occupation, and that a Person can be linked to the Place where they work.

The two halves

• Kinds of entities. Every kind of thing your world tracks, and what each one records about itself.
• How entities connect. The ways one entity can be linked to another, and what a link can record.

Familiar ideas under plainer names

Building Blocks uses everyday words for ideas that the rest of this site names more formally. A kind is an entity type. A detail is a property. A connection is a relationship type. If you have read the Data model reference you have already met all three under those other names, and they mean exactly the same things.

What your world starts with

No world begins empty. Every new world is seeded from a template that brings a general-purpose set of kinds, covering Person, Place, Event, Group, Project, Interest, Item, Reference and Rule, along with a few dozen ready-made connections between them. Most people never need to change any of it. The full starting list is in the default schema.

You are free to adapt it as your world grows. A world built around a novel might add a Character kind. A world used for consulting might add a Contract kind and a connection linking it to a client.

Building Blocks, world instructions, or a rule?

Orbismo gives you three ways to shape how your AI behaves, and they answer different questions.

Use Building Blocks when your world has nowhere to put something. If you keep wanting to record your suppliers and no existing kind fits them, the structure is what needs to change.

Use world instructions when the places already exist but your AI keeps using them in the wrong way. Instructions are a standing brief about how you want the world worked in, covering tone, conventions and the habits you expect.

A rule suits a repeatable routine, such as a workout log or a reading tracker. Rules live inside a world as entities rather than in its structure, so you create them by talking to your AI in the usual way.

When your AI notices a change

A connected tool reads your world’s structure once, at the start of a session. A conversation that is already open carries on working from the structure it read when it began, so a kind you add halfway through will not show up in it. Start a fresh conversation and your AI picks up the change.

What changed

Every save you make to the building blocks is recorded. Open What changed from the Building Blocks screen to see the list, newest first, with the name of the person responsible for each entry. In a world with collaborators that is the quickest way to understand how the structure came to look the way it does.

The log is a record rather than a way back, and nothing in it reverses itself. To undo something, open the kind or connection it describes and change it back yourself, which is then recorded as another entry.