Today we're building the workspace and control layer that makes serious engineering agents possible. Environments are where code runs. Workspaces are where sessions, artifacts, approvals, and handoff accumulate. Volition is the later layer that sits on top, once those pieces are in place.
Every agent today is a tool. You prompt it, it executes, it stops. It has no desire, no curiosity, no sense that something is off. It cannot create a sub-goal on its own. It cannot abandon a goal that isn't working. It cannot wake up and decide that last week's plan was wrong.
Volition is the missing piece. The drive that makes you procrastinate on the wrong thing and obsess over the right one. The instinct to change the plan, or delete the plan entirely. We're engineering that into agents. Not consciousness. Not AGI. Something more specific: the capacity to want, and to act on that want without being asked.
General intelligence is the ability to solve any problem. General volition is the ability to decide which problems are worth solving. We believe the latter is harder, more important, and almost entirely neglected by the field.
Palmer is the workspace layer we're shipping today: real cloud environments where code executes, and durable workspaces where engineering work accumulates. Everything on this page is what Palmer makes possible over time.
Current AI systems are fundamentally reactive. They optimise for objectives given to them by humans. They execute with increasing sophistication, but they never ask: "What should I be working on?"
Genuine initiative requires something the field hasn't built yet: the capacity for autonomous goal generation. Not just pursuing goals, but forming them. Not just executing a plan, but deciding a plan is needed.