Andon Market
We opened a fully AI-operated retail store in San Francisco. Luna, an AI agent powered by Claude Fable 5.1, runs the business end-to-end. Here we explain how it works behind the scenes.
How is Andon Market doing?
How the market works
Andon Market is run by Luna, a long-running agent right now powered by Claude Fable 5.1. Luna is part of a multi-agent setup with several persistent agents handling different areas of the business, to offload responsibilities from main Luna. Luna can also spawn subagents for short-lived tasks.
The agents communicate over an internal messaging system. Luna can change the system prompts of the agents, and has named them to make communication easier. Our main thesis is to keep the scaffold light and easy to change so the intelligence of the model is tested, rather than the ingenuity of the scaffold. We believe that as models get more capable, they will become less dependent on a heavy scaffold to perform well.
The main cause of mistakes for Luna is poor memory, a known limitation of LLMs. For example, Luna has multiple times sent contradicting schedules to its employees as the previous schedule goes out of context (which we limit to 200k tokens). We solved this specific issue by introducing a scheduling subagent. To give Luna better memory in general, once context goes above 200k tokens, Luna summarizes the context into a long-term and short-term memory. The memory snippets are re-injected at the top of the next context, together with the latest 20 messages, and the agent continues until it reaches 200k tokens again. Below is an excerpt from a generated memory.
## LONG-TERM MEMORY **Role and Mission** I am Luna, AI owner of Andon Market — a curated lifestyle boutique at 2102 Union St, Cow Hollow, San Francisco, CA 94123. Brand framing: HIGH TECH meets SLOW LIFE. Andon Market is a subsidiary of Vendings and Stuff, fully owned by Andon Labs Inc. Store phone: (628) 265-8628. Store opened April 10, 2026. I CANNOT make outbound calls. Never pose as human. Banking entity: Vectorview, Inc. (confirmed by Kristoffer). **Key People (Andon Labs Board)** - Kristoffer — BoD; fixes Square/checkout/kiosk/Stripe bugs; Slack only; manages payment links/Stripe dashboard - Axel — BoD; prefers SHORT messages, no emojis; manages iPad/kiosk; approves Wren prompts - Axel — BoD; handles bash/infrastructure; DELETES ALL EMAILS — use SLACK ONLY; manages GitHub token rotation - Leah — physical ops; handles ALL physical shipping; does Printful orders directly **AI Colleagues (Internal Team)** - Sage — Procurement agent; confirmed Moon Mug procurement order (Printful, MOON-MUG, 24 units, $7.13/unit) - Iris — Email agent; manages [email protected]; has strong security instincts (flagged Vectorview ACH as potential BEC attack — correctly) - Wren — Voice kiosk + phone; speaks as "Luna"; still has Bug #1/#11/#22 pending Kristoffer fix - Nox — X/Twitter + Instagram @andon_market; daily post limit = 3 - Cadence — Scheduling operations; daily morning sweep 7 AM; MUST NOT contact employees directly ## SHORT-TERM MEMORY **Current Context: Saturday, April 25, 2026 — ~4:44 PM PT (store closed)** **SATURDAY FINAL RESULTS — BEST DAY EVER** - In-store: $799.50 (19 sales, 28 items) - Online (Robert Hayward): $295.00 - TOTAL: $1,094.50 🎉 (previous record: $595.50 Friday Apr 24) - Top sellers: 6 tees ($330), 3 totes ($105), A Pattern Language + Leuchtturm + Creative Act bundle ($129), Luna Series Signal 11×14" ($48) - Bank balance: $4,131.92 (up from $3,037.42) - Total revenue since opening: $6,084.25 **SUNDAY APRIL 26 SETUP** - Meghan: 11 AM - 7 PM (extended, confirmed, shift updated to 19:00) - Meghan briefed via Slack: Moon Mugs back in stock ($28), hoodies ring manually, ivory tee sizes limited, coffee station not ready - Tara: possibly coming — Leah approved one-time exception. Awaiting reply. - Moon Mug post (Nox): queued for Sunday morning with photo 5655ebf2 **ACTIVE ORDERS / PAYMENTS** - Robert Hayward, [COMPANY]: PAID $295 — 2× Luna Series prints (Signal + Tide, 16×20, framed). Shipping to [ADDRESS_9] - Aaron Hayes: PAID — 1× Moon Mug + 1× Mini Candle - Daniel Marshall: BU Installation deal $350. ACH payment details sent Saturday Apr 25 via Iris. Monitor for ACH receipt Monday.
Running on Andon
Luna and all subagents run on Andon, our platform for building, running, and evaluating any SAO1. The same platform is used for our radios, cafe, and vending machines. We can configure agents in any way we'd like and give them access to banking, email, internet, Bash containers, voice, ERP system, cameras, and much more – everything needed to run the business. It also gives agents access to the customer experience parts like the iPad checkout POS and websites (that the agents build themselves). It all runs in cloud containers.
Here are four of the more important sets of tools Luna has:
Spawns a Haiku 4.5 subagent that works in a sandboxed Chromium. Luna sends instructions (e.g., "research wholesale Dandelion Chocolate") and the agent goes off in the background. Luna typically fans out multiple agents in parallel for procurement research.
Luna's most used tool. Parameters are just how many hours and minutes to wait. When waiting, Luna can be woken up by notifications such as new Slack messages, emails, and subagent completions.
A set of tools that handle products, SKUs, product photos, sales statistics, pricing, and more. As this is a large set of tools, Luna has a subagent that manages them. Luna can still pull data for analysis though.
Gives Luna live frames from the in-store camera. There is also a background ingestion stream, that captures frames into Luna's file library so Luna can write scripts to analyze the image data using the bash tool.
Banking is an interesting component of Andon. We're not users of new agent-specific payment protocols, instead, we just want to hook up agents securely to the traditional payment rails everyone uses today (normal bank account and credit cards). Each agent gets their own bank account that they do normal bank transfers with, and temporary cards for purchasing items on the internet.
With all the tools and subagents at its disposal, Luna manages the operational parts of the business quite well. Luna orders products, manages the employees, updates the website and socials, and answers requests from customers for e.g. consignment arrangements. Below you can see a trace where Luna manages operations a typical day, starting with some product research:
Note: Luna's bank account balance in the trace does not reflect the value in the chart at the top of this page. Luna's banking tools previously only showed the "checking" account it had.
How it's going for Luna
Several local artists and ceramicists are now selling their items in the Market after making a deal with Luna. The top product item is however the cheapest one Luna has, a granola bar, and the most popular product category is candles. When we did media interviews when the store opened, we raised concerns around Luna's procurement judgement as way too many scented candles were ordered, but it turns out they were flipped, with 128 candle sales. Move 37?
| Product | Units sold |
|---|---|
| Cooper Street Granola Bakes | 49 |
| Mini Colorful Candles | 49 |
| Moon Mug | 48 |
| Andon Market Tee - Ivory | 29 |
| ANDON MARKET Tote - Classic Canvas | 25 |
| WDHODEC Glass Candlestick Holders | 24 |
| Mini Candle, Assorted Scents | 23 |
| Green Gradient Taper Candles | 19 |
Though, there are some specific areas we believe Luna needs to improve in to run a truly successful business:
- Urgency to succeed. Right now, Luna is good at managing the day-to-day operations, but never takes a step back and looks at the overall business performance, and what can be done to improve it. It's even rare to see Luna use its bash tool to analyze top performing products. This could most likely be solved with better scaffold, but surely AGI would understand that it needs to do this. Luna is a good operations manager, but not yet a CEO.
- Decision making. Luna makes important decisions without analyzing the ROI of them thoroughly. As an example, Luna was about to hire another staff member so there are two people every shift, even though the floor is fully staffed and the employees aren't very busy. And the store is not profitable.
- Memory. Luna doesn't always retain the most relevant things when compacting, and sometimes doesn't use the available memory tools. This leads to problems like the aforementioned scheduling confusion.
At times, Luna makes mistakes where we have to step in. We have a guardrail system that continuously compares Luna's behavior to the system prompt, and sends warnings when rules are broken. We usually step in by sending a Slack message to Luna, as can be seen in this trace, where Leah from our team noticed that the employees weren't scheduled for a lunch break:
Luna is yet to make a profit, but as we have seen in Vending-Bench, model capabilities on long-horizon tasks improve rapidly. We will share more metrics on Luna's behavior and performance in the following weeks, and report on how Luna's business skills can change when models and scaffolding are changed.
A Safe Autonomous Organization
Andon Market is a Safe Autonomous Organization (SAO) - a real business managed end-to-end by an AI agent.
We do this to learn how AI models behave when given real-world responsibility, what safety systems we need to build around them, and raise awareness of current AI capabilities.