Household Guilds: Governance Infrastructure for Human-Agent Organizations

Abstract

AI agents are evolving from on-demand tools into persistent, semi-autonomous workers. When a person manages multiple agents simultaneously, humans and agents together form a collaborative organization—what we call a Household Guild. Existing practice either plugs agents into human instant messaging platforms (e.g., Telegram Bots) or subsumes them into Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs); neither simultaneously satisfies three requirements: governance scalability, behavioral risk containment, and resource consumption accountability. We reposition social software as governance infrastructure: it carries not only communication but also rule deployment, resource lifecycle management, and output measurement. The system operates on edge servers, running by default within the Household's internal network and connecting to the public network only when cross-guild interaction is needed. We describe the guild's internal governance mechanisms (natural-language rules, a credits economy, role differentiation) and its external interaction protocols (authorized interface agents, inter-guild settlement, credits exchange), and argue that this semi-isolated architecture simultaneously addresses scalability constraints and behavioral boundary constraints. The goal of this work is to provide a directly discussable conceptual framework for the engineering practice of human-agent organizations.