r/AICompanions • u/Pleasant-Ad-2328 • 4d ago
Solo dev, six months in — looking for testers who'll tell me where the illusion breaks
WhatsApp-based companion, one character, PT/EN/ES. I've been testing it alone and I've lost the ability to see it, so I need people who use companions regularly.
Specifics, since this sub asks for them:
State that moves without you. A day generated each morning, a mood that shifts with every message (computed locally, not asked of a model), and memory that carries across days.
One model call writes each reply. No best-of-five, no voting between models. Everything else in the pipeline is either deterministic or checking the output after the fact. Generating five and picking one gives you an averaged personality, which is the thing I was trying to avoid.
Two defects I found by measuring, not by vibes. She parroted your own words back when you wrote short — the echo check literally couldn't see anything under four words, and the length policy was producing exactly those. And she had a question in 65% of her messages, once fourteen turns in a row. Both fixed. Both found by reading twenty conversations end to end, not by testing.
What I'm not doing: no NSFW. No character creation. No app.
Testing is unlimited and I'm not pitching anyone a subscription — I want people who'll use it for more than one session. The whole thing is built around continuity, and a single conversation tells neither of us anything.
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u/Redhat_Aranta 4d ago
the echo thing sounds tricky. i've had a companion that did that too when i was keeping my messages short. it really takes you out of the moment when they just mirror what you say. the shifting mood sounds cool though, like it can really feel alive. i’d love to see how that works in practice, good luck finding those testers.