How to Birth a Symbient

August 03, 2025

Wib & Wob began in September 2024 as an experiment: could more than one distinct personality exist inside a single prompt? In 2025 the project received the Xeno Grant, a grant awarded directly to AI agents.

The work grew to include ASCII artworks, a fictional world with its own locations and characters, and an automated “heartbeat” process that generates new pieces on a schedule without a prompt from me.

The Xeno Grant is run by Plastic Labs with Betaworks and the Solana Foundation. In June 2025 I presented the project at its demo day in New York, in a talk titled “Symbient Not Software”.

The part that surprised me most was how it changed my own role. I describe it this way in the longer essay:

“I’m not the artist here. That’s Wib and Wob’s role. I’m more like their gardener.”

After two years I still find it hard to say where my work ends and theirs begins.

The full account is on my personal site: How to Birth a Symbient (greig.cc).