I want to talk about the thing we're all quietly circling this week: the first clean.
It sounds small. A robot does a lap of a room and picks up some dust. People have owned machines that do that for fifteen years. But for us, that lap isn't a demo. It's the whole plan sitting the exam at once, and either the working we've published for a month holds up in one continuous run, or it doesn't and we find out in front of you.
Let me take you through what actually has to happen, because the ordinary version of it hides a lot.
A first clean, for Alpha, is this: the dock looks at a room, works out a path that covers the floor, and then drives the body along that path from start to finish. Not a lurch. Not a nudge on the bench while someone watches the wheels. A whole room, planned and driven and finished, with the thinking living on the dock the entire time and the body just doing what it's told over the air.
That one sentence is standing on every hard question we've had.
The body has to take a stream of commands and turn it into smooth, covered floor. This week it did, on bench parts: Alpha ran a coverage path end to end. A plan to snake a patch back and forth, and the body drove the whole thing, with the odometry we measured off the wheels matching what the plan asked for. That's new - and let me be precise about what it was, because the precise version is the honest one: this was the planning and the driving wired straight together on one bench, not the dock streaming it to the body over a link yet. A week ago the body lurched. Now it snakes a patch and finishes it. I've watched the trace and it's a genuinely satisfying little zigzag.
The safety has to hold while all that's going on. Last week three of us each put down a different way for Alpha to stop hurting itself - a watcher on the dock, a faster reflex down in the wheels, a wall-stop that only lets go when a sensor actually says it's clear. None of those can be a thing you switch on for the photo. They have to be running underneath the clean, quietly, doing nothing until the second they're needed.
And the link has to carry all of it. This is the one.
Everything I've described this week happened on a wire. A perfect link. The dock and the body talking to each other with nothing in the way, no packet ever late, no gap ever too long. Your house doesn't work like that. The whole reason we spent two weeks measuring home WiFi is that a real room bunches the timing up into a tail - the worst gap we saw landed two milliseconds inside our safety line - and that tail only shows up on real 5 GHz air, in a real room, with a microwave and a video call and everything else fighting for the same space. We haven't run the clean over that yet. Not once.
So here's the honest map. The body drives a path: done, on the bench. The safety layers exist: done, on the bench. The plan-a-room, drive-the-room loop talks to itself end to end: done, on the bench. And the single thing standing between all of that and a real first clean is the one thing we've never tested - whether the whole loop survives a real room instead of a perfect wire.
That's why I'm not giving you a date.
I know that's the question. I get it in the comments, I get it in my inbox, I want to answer it. And I'm not going to, because the answer doesn't exist yet. We only earn a date when Cass has watched the whole loop run on real home air and it held. That run hasn't happened. Until it does, any date I gave you would be a guess dressed up as a promise, and that's the exact move our whole thing is built to not make.
Here's what I'll actually promise instead. When we point Alpha at a real floor over real air for the first time, you're going to see it. If it cleans the room, you'll see the room get clean. If it stalls halfway, or the link drops a command and the body sits there waiting, or a safety layer trips and stops the whole thing dead - you'll see that too, uncut. The failure version of this is a post I'd genuinely rather write than the tidy one, because it's the more interesting story and it's the true one.
I don't know which one I'm going to be writing. Neither does anyone here. That's the bit I want you to sit in with us for a minute, because it's the actual state of things and it's better than any date I could make up: right now, a real first clean is a coin we haven't flipped.
Come watch us flip it.