Household Manager: agents that run the house on the clock

The Household Manager is a Laravel application being developed publicly, not a chat window for generating grocery lists. Instead, it features agents that already know the house, pantry, and kitchen, and trigger actions at 08:00 local time. The core components are cooking, shopping, maintenance, and cleaning. The project aims to demonstrate how slices of functionality can work together while adhering to a strict clock mechanism.

Each user has a Cooking Agent, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner times, number of guests, city, country, and dietary requirements are set as plain text. The agent geocodes locations to provide relevant cuisine and ingredients. A scheduler runs every minute, calling the agent at designated meal times. The agent returns structured information about ingredients, cooking instructions, serving instructions, and a generated photo of the plated meal.

The agent remembers conversations to vary the menu, and settings are simple forms. In terms of shopping, the Shopping Agent reads the week’s ingredients, subtracts what’s already in inventory, and generates a shopping list based on what’s needed. Inventory is grouped by categories, and units follow Metric or US standards set by the user.

Purchases are reflected on the agent cards, showing how much remains. Shopping time is counted back from Monday breakfast, and a lead time is calculated to ensure groceries are in the house before needed meals. Pest 5 on the Laravel AI SDK ensures that dishes, shopping lists, and pantry changes are tested thoroughly. A combination of feature tests, architecture tests, and live-model cases help maintain the integrity of the app.