The front door is a record, not a chat
The first design decision that mattered was what you see when you open Penchant.
The default answer, the one every assistant ships, is a chat box. It is friendly and it demos well. It is also the wrong front door for software that acts on your behalf, because a chat log is a story the system tells about itself. You scroll it, you trust it, and the record of what actually happened is tangled up with the pleasantries around it.
So the front door is not a chat window. It is a delegation ledger: a plain, standing list of what the agents have done, what they are doing now, and what is waiting on you. Three states, in order of how much they need you — done, doing, needs-you.
The point of a ledger over a feed is that it is answerable. Every line is a real action or a real decision, not a turn in a conversation. You can read down it in a few seconds and know where things stand without reconstructing it from dialogue. "Done" means done, with a trail; "needs-you" means the system has deliberately stopped and handed something back.
This costs something, and it is worth naming. A ledger is less chatty and less immediately reassuring than a stream of "sure, on it!" messages. It asks the user to trust a record instead of a personality. We think that is the right trade for a system whose whole job is to be trustworthy about consequential things — but it is a trade, not a free win, and if it turns out people simply will not read a ledger, that is a finding we will publish here rather than paper over.
Chat still exists inside Penchant, for shaping work. It is just not the thing you land on. The thing you land on is the record.