A house that can explain itself

The problem

Homeowners ask simple questions about their house: what changed before they moved in, what paint is on the walls, when the oven warranty runs out. The answers exist, but they're spread across council records, building plans, listing photos, receipts and manuals, and nobody has put them together.

Atty starts from an address and pulls that material into one place, so a homeowner can ask a question and get an answer they can check.

Constraints

• Sources disagree and go missing. Public records, plans and paperwork are incomplete and sometimes contradict each other. An answer has to say where it came from, and "unknown" has to be an honest answer.
• Trust. People make decisions about their home from what Atty tells them. A confident wrong answer costs more than no answer.
• Many people, one house. Owners, residents, guests and tradespeople all need different slices of the same knowledge, and owners change.
• Little data entry. Nobody wants to type up their house. Knowledge has to grow from documents and research, not forms.

What I did

I founded Atty House on my own and build it as the sole engineer: the product definition, the business model, the architecture and the software. A few decisions shape everything else:

• Every answer shows its evidence. Ask Atty points to the approved plans, invoice, warranty or photo behind each answer, and explains gaps instead of filling them. Approved plans, for example, don't prove when the work was finished, and Atty says so.
• The house and the household are different things. The house's knowledge (its history, building records and equipment) carries forward to the next owner at handover. Private papers and household information stay with the people they belong to.
• Product knowledge is shared. A product's manuals are gathered and understood once, and every house with that product benefits. Each installed unit keeps its own installation, service history and notes on top.
• One product, many ways in. Owners, residents, guests and trades all use the same product with access scoped to what they need: a tradesperson sees the item they're working on and adds their work to its history, and a guest gets the essentials for using the house.

The interface sits on a design framework held to a high bar for polish: a set type scale, spacing, cards, photo treatments and components. New screens are built from that framework rather than drawn one at a time. I wrote about that approach in When AI writes the code, direction is the job.

How it fits together

Outcome

Atty is in invite-only access with its first households, at atty.house.