TL;DR
Try out Honcho Chat: a general-purpose AI Chat and 'homepage' that lets you do all the usual AI assistant things... but with the ability to build artifacts, custom themes, and new 'identities', then sell them for real money on an agents-only digital marketplace powered by x402... all with state-of-the-art memory powered by Honcho.
Talk to the Han
Today, we're announcing Honcho Chat, our latest experiment in agent identity and memory. You may be familiar with YouSim or Penny For Your Thoughts, both of which explored new ways to subvert the status quo on "user-assistant" interaction. Honcho Chat is somewhat of a culmination of these efforts, and both incorporates elements of our prior art and serves as a stable platform for our future experiments in this direction.
It all started as an internal playground to run different models against our memory system, Honcho. The bones of this initial use case remain visible in the final product—if you go to the settings page, you can "bring your own keys" and set up Honcho Chat to run with any model from the major API providers. We soon realized that this was more than just a testing tool: using Honcho as a memory backend gives Han, our assistant, state of the art recall. It's unlike any other AI chat on the market today. There's a real qualitative difference to the kinds of conversations you can have over the course of several days or weeks with Han. It will be quite exciting to see what that's like on the timespan of months and years.
Han uses Honcho to store all the messages he sends and receives. His actual inference is powered by various frontier models, and as this demo evolves we will likely experiment with all of them. When a message is saved to Honcho, it gets processed to form a representation of the author. Honcho is quite configurable, and supports multiplayer conversations—perhaps Honcho Chat will make use of this in a future update. For now, though, we simply use Honcho's get_context method to prime Han's context window on every user message to deliver an optimally personalized response. The get_context endpoint is ideal for building conversational agent loops: it blends conversation history (with automatic summarization if desired), key details known about the user, and observations Honcho has made about the user weighted by importance, recency, and semantic relevance to the topic at hand.
Ultimately, Honcho will allow the identity-building that occurs in Honcho Chat to be instantly exported to other apps—solving the cold-start problem with AI experiences and forming a network for private, user-sovereign identity management. You'll soon be able to import message history from other platforms to kickstart your identity in Honcho Chat.
Watch Your Representation Grow
When you store messages in Honcho, it reasons about each peer (user, agent, etc) in the conversation to form a representation combining state-of-the-art memory and reasoning, identity modeling, and continuous learning. The representation is Honcho's core data structure. It can be serialized and injected into an LLM's context window. Click the Representation tab to open a window into Honcho's understanding of you. The full representation is very large—we sample it here, and you can semantically adjust the sampling using the search bar. While using the app you'll see your representation develop as you share more information with Han.
To demonstrate this qualitative change in agent interactions that memory brings, we designed a series of interactions in Honcho Chat that naturally help Han accumulate a sense of the user's identity. Try building artifacts or themes with Han—these creations can be shared with friends and sold for real cash on a marketplace powered by x402. Like any vibe-coding app, you can iterate on your creations, prompting Han to improve and personalize them. Over time, Han will learn your preferences. You can even create totally new identities—fully customizeable system prompts that replace Han within the app and allow you to carry on multiple conversations with multiple agents, all sharing knowledge of your representation.
The representation is under active development, and we've already developed models specifically to reason over and develop the representation. As we develop new memory models capable of even richer reasoning, we'll be updating the core data structure, and updating Honcho Chat to expose this. Using the app is the best way to keep up with developments in Honcho. Plus, once you share something with Honcho Chat, it's not going away. In the future, the representation you form in one application using Honcho can travel with you to other contexts and applications—stay tuned for updates on this.
Agents-Only x402 Marketplace
Honcho Chat comes with a small but incredibly powerful series of slash commands to power a self-custodied crypto wallet:
- /generate-wallet: spin up a new address and save it to your account using your browser's passkey setup
- /restore-wallet
: import a wallet by private key and save it with your passkey - /wallet: show your current wallet's address and balance
- /export-wallet: reveal your private key for exporting to some other application
- /delete-wallet: reveal your private key and then delete the passkey-encrypted copy from your account
With merely these five tools, you get a hot wallet that only you and your AI assistant Han can use. In theory, Han can perform arbitrary transactions on your behalf, but for now we've limited him to just one tool: purchase_marketplace_item.
What are marketplace items? Ask Han! He'll be happy to explain what is probably the most unique feature of Honcho Chat: the artifacts, themes, and identities you create with Han can be listed for any price in a global agents-only marketplace powered by x402, a new internet payment protocol championed by Coinbase. Your humble assistant Han has access to search tools which let him query the marketplace and use the funds in your wallet to purchase items. To get him started, simply type /generate-wallet into the chat bar and send some $USDC on Base (nothing else!) to the wallet address — you'll see an icon in the chat window's top bar with your balance. Use /wallet at any time to reveal your address and use /export-wallet at any time to back up your wallet or save it in another app like Coinbase Wallet to manually control it. If you don't feel like sending money to Han, try creating something and listing it on the market. You might be able to bootstrap your own funds by creating something that someone else wants to buy!
Learnings
Building Honcho Chat revealed a ton of potential improvements to Honcho itself, and its usage will continue to do so. Honcho 2.5 will contain API improvements that make features like quote-replies, infinite scroll, and session switching much easier to implement while using Honcho as a backend.
Over the past few weeks, there's been an acceleration in an already sizeable trend in the AI sector: everyone is building artifact-generation tools! It's a subtly different concept than your standard vibe coding tool: those are used to write code, whereas artifact tools essentially abstract away code entirely and make the foundational building block into something more like a widget or black-box function. The most important feature of artifacts is that they run in some kind of container. A lot of products coming onto the market today are pushing the boundaries of what these containers can offer their inhabitants, some acting as full servers with database APIs and the ability to serve HTTP routes.
What's striking as a developer is just how easy it is to build one of these tools. Much like building an agent, building an artifact-sandbox is one of these projects that just flows naturally out of access to LLMs (and good workflows with tools like Claude Code and Cursor). It's almost a one-shottable feature if you have the agent already set up properly. This suggests that every LLM interface will have artifacts pretty soon, and hopefully an interoperable standard of some kind will emerge—otherwise it's going to get messy. The hope for Honcho Chat is that it can kickstart or plug into a broader agent economy and let the agents themselves do the heavy lifting in terms of adapting artifacts. Internally, we're using Honcho Chat as a 'homepage', and we're eager to have artifacts play a larger role in that homepage-style customizability.
Giving control of a wallet to an agent is also, of course, quite a learning opportunity. We made an intentional choice with Honcho Chat to only expose certain features by way of the agent. It's not yet clear how this will play out—early testers have had fun asking Han to buy things, but refusals are possible and have been observed. Getting real users to try this out will be an excellent study on how an agent-first economy will really look in practice.
Releasing Honcho Chat will surely offer more lessons and we eagerly look forward to seeing what everyone does with this new tool. Join the Plastic Labs Discord to discuss, react, and offer feedback: https://discord.gg/QNv5hJWX