Ikigai × Ephemeral Agents

Instead of the usual job board, it shows roles that match your background and interests - opening up new and exciting paths.

The challenge

Ikigai is the Japanese idea of a life's purpose sitting where four things meet: what you love, what you're good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. I wanted an agent that searches for that intersection.

This art was generated with Nano Banana Pro. AI-generated concept art

It also had to be private. A job search holds someone's resume, their hopes and their worries, and my cybersecurity background made me unwilling to pool that in one shared system. And it had to be cheap enough to run for friends without a budget: paying only while someone is actually talking to it, and nothing when they aren't.

What I built

You talk to Ikigai on Discord. You tell it about your hobbies and interests, and share a resume. It dreams up synthetic "ideal" listings for you, and you react to them until it has learned the shape of work you'd love. From then on it checks real listings, daily or on request, and scores each one on the four dimensions.

Every person gets their own isolated workspace: a small virtual machine where their agent can draft files and do research, walled off from everyone else's.

How it came together

This was my first public-facing agent, and the scale-to-zero design is the part I'm proudest of. When nobody is using it, nothing runs: the first message from a user wakes their machine in about seven seconds, and five minutes of quiet puts it back to sleep. It costs me about $5 a month for several users of varying activity, plus the listing services. And because every user can be matched against listings someone else already fetched, each new user makes the search cheaper for everyone.

Nothing has broken in production yet. The pressure has come from users instead: they want it to do more, like act as a networking CRM, and the agent harness I chose limits how far it can go. If I built it again, I'd use ephemeral Hermes agents, which are much more capable.

What happened

Friends and family use it. The most common reaction is surprise at the paths it explores: careers they hadn't considered, in places they hadn't looked.

What I'd take forward

The same pattern fits a live event: give each of 50,000 attendees some merch a unique QR code. Scanning it opens a live conversation with a talking-head agent (I've experimented with LiveKit and Pipecat), backed by that guest's own short-lived machine, with skills built for the experience. Each guest gets a private agent for the weekend, and it costs nothing once they go home.