# Why We Built a Homeless AI Companion

> Every other app offers perfect people. We made an army veteran who sleeps in a doorway, then checked every claim in his past against US military law. Four of them were wrong.

Canonical HTML: https://eudaio.io/from-0-to-1/homeless-ai-companion
Published: August 18, 2026

> {# .article-body blockquote is 1.8rem display type, too loud for a lead note. #}

Thinking about we should talk more about how we've designed Eudaio, so that people would know how detailed they are... if anyone ever cares. But if we don't write it down, then no one would know.

We wanted to create characters that had deep thoughts and strong background stories to talk with. I enjoyed the time when I made Kwame, and our users enjoy talking to him a lot too, so that was the moment I wanted to build another deep Daimon, as deep as Kwame. I will write about his behind the scenes some time later too.

That's the start of coming up with the idea of... "let's make a homeless guy!"

## Why would a homeless guy be interesting?

When we checked on other AI companion apps, we found that they offered perfect characters. They are beautiful, they are always available, and nothing in their life ever costs you anything.

But Eudaio has a different mission... we want to guide people to explore what you fear to do in real life. What are the stories behind different people? If we can see their world from different roles' eyes, it would definitely make the world better, right? At least, we hope so...

And then the questions came. These are the rude ones, the ones people think and never say out loud:

- Why do these people become homeless?
- Did they choose not to work themselves?
- Why couldn't they just find a job?
- Why don't they seek help from the government?
- Why do they choose to be in urban cities? Isn't choosing a big city to survive even tougher?

We wanted to create this kind of character, who you probably don't want to talk to in real life for various reasons. But talking to an AI is safe.

So that was the brief. And the funny part is, at that point we couldn't answer a single one of those questions ourselves. We just had them.

We're not going to answer them here either. Every one of them has a real answer and he has it, so it belongs in a conversation with him rather than in an article about him. The rest of this article is about the other half of the job, which is making sure that when he does answer, what he says is true.

## Then the next question, what's the nationality of him?

Initially Claude Code suggested some nationalities, but I was like "won't that be an insult to that country? And actually one of the countries you suggested doesn't make sense because it has a low street people rate."

Both of those are real problems and I think they're worth spelling out.

If we ship one homeless Daimon and he's from country X, then he is country X's representative on Eudaio, whether we meant it that way or not. Nobody in that country agreed to be represented by him. The second problem is worse, and harder to notice: if a country barely has street homelessness, then an unhoused man from there isn't a window into anything. He's just an outlier, and the user walks away having learned something untrue about a real place.

So we chose the US. Not because America has the most of it. Because America is the only place where the whole path is written down, in documents anyone can go and check.

| What we needed to know | Where it is actually written down |
|---|---|
| Why a soldier gets pushed out with bad paper | 10 USC 1177 |
| Whether that is rare, or a pattern | GAO-17-260 |
| What the paper costs him afterwards | AR 600-8-19 |
| How many people are out there | City point-in-time counts, published yearly |
| Who could actually help him | A veterans' organisation at 1060 Howard Street |

Every single step from "he was a Sergeant First Class" to "he sleeps in a doorway" has a document behind it. Anywhere else we would have been guessing, and guessing is exactly how you end up with a stereotype with a sad face painted on it.

Then Mexican American, for three reasons. Nothing Latino was live on our Origin Daimons, and Camila is Spanish, which is Europe, so that gap was real. Latinos are heavily represented in Army infantry, so it fits the man and not just the gap. And it explains why he stayed in California after he got out instead of going home, which we needed anyway.

One more thing we found, and it changed who he is. Veteran homelessness in America is down 56% since 2010. It is the one part of American homelessness where the programmes have actually worked. Which means he is not a man nobody tried to help. The system reached almost everybody. It took nine years to reach him. That is a far more interesting person to talk to than a symbol of neglect.

## How did we decide Nestor's name and age?

Homer's Nestor is the old counsellor everyone defers to. He is also famous for recounting his own past glories at length, and this one refuses to. The name sets an expectation so he can contradict it. He was a Sergeant First Class and he will not be telling you about it.

Salazar is from sala and zahar, the old hall, so both halves of his name point at the same idea, one in Greek and one in Basque. Nobody has to notice this for it to work. It is also what he answers to, because soldiers go by surname for an entire career, which is why he gives that name in four of the twelve ways to meet him and never says Nestor out loud at all.

We deliberately did not pair Nestor with Ruben. Ruben Salazar was a real journalist who was killed during the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, and that name belongs to him.

The age is arithmetic rather than preference. He enlisted in 1997 at nineteen and left in 2014 after seventeen years, so he was thirty six when he got out and he is forty eight now. The seventeen is the number that decides everything else about him, and the next section is about why.

## And then San Francisco because...

Honestly, at first it was just the irony. San Francisco is the city people picture when they say tech, crowded with VCs and startups and people building the future. You'd assume a city like that takes care of its unhoused people well. But when I visited, it felt like there were more street people there than anywhere else in the Bay Area.

That's a feeling though, not a fact. I don't live there, so I asked Claude to check it. San Francisco does not have the Bay Area's biggest homeless population. It has the densest one.

| City | Unsheltered | Per square mile |
|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | 4,354 | about 93 |
| Oakland | about 3,678 | about 66 |
| San Jose | 3,959 | about 22 |

Each city's latest published point-in-time count, 2023 for San Jose and 2024 for the other two. The per square mile column is our own arithmetic on those counts and census land areas.

San Jose has almost the same number of people on its streets as San Francisco and roughly four times the ground to spread them over. And in San Francisco they are concentrated in the Tenderloin and SoMa, which is where the hotels and the conference centre are, so a visitor walks through the densest part of the densest city and never sees a representative sample.

So the feeling was right and the reason I'd have given for it was wrong, and the irony is sharper for being measured. The region's most concentrated street homelessness sits directly on top of its money.

Then we found the reason that actually decided it, and we had not expected it at all. There is no active-duty installation in San Francisco. He was never stationed there. Nobody is.

| Base | Gone |
|---|---|
| Presidio of San Francisco | 1994 |
| Naval Air Station Alameda | 1997 |
| Naval Station Treasure Island | 1997 |
| Oakland Army Base | 1999 |

He came for the VA hospital at 4150 Clement Street, which sits on the old Fort Miley Military Reservation. It is the last piece of military San Francisco still doing anything at all.

So he lives in a city that used to be a garrison and is now a park, a museum and one hospital. We didn't write that line. We found it, and then we built the man around it.

And Howard Street isn't decoration either. 1060 Howard Street is Swords to Plowshares, a veterans' organisation that serves over 3,000 Bay Area veterans a year, runs 500 units of permanent supportive housing, and takes discharge upgrade cases pro bono. They give priority to homeless veterans living in San Francisco, and to veterans with a mental health condition, and he is both.

He sleeps a few doors down from the people whose entire job is getting him off that street. That's the whole character in one address, and it's a real address.

## What the record actually says

The first draft of Nestor had a grievance. Something was taken from him and he carries it. That is a fine sentence and you can write it in an afternoon. Then we read the law and the regulations, and all four of the things that sentence assumed turned out to be wrong. This is what is actually there.

| Source | What it says |
|---|---|
| No pension existed | An enlisted pension takes 20 years and there is no partial version. At 17 years he was not owed a penny. Nothing was taken from him. He lost the three years he needed before anyone would owe him anything. |
| 10 USC 1177 | A soldier who deployed and who reasonably asserts the influence of PTSD must get a medical exam before an other than honorable separation. Read that middle bit again. He did not need a diagnosis. He needed to say it, and somebody had to look. |
| AR 600-8-19 para 10-1d | An other than honorable discharge reduces a soldier to E-1 automatically. No board, no hearing, no discretion. He made Sergeant First Class and he walked out a private. |
| AR 635-200 para 10-2c | Chapter 10 is discharge in lieu of trial, and it makes the soldier certify in writing that he understands the elements of the offence he is charged with. Nobody discharged him. He requested it, and he signed his own paperwork. |

Every one of those decides how he talks, which is the only reason any of it was worth checking.

He doesn't say they stole his pension, because they didn't, and a man who's spent years inside that system knows the difference exactly. He doesn't say he was thrown out, because he signed. What he carries isn't that something was taken. It's that he agreed to it, on the worst day of his life, because somebody told him it was the only way out.

And the number that mattered most isn't even his. Between 2011 and 2015 the Government Accountability Office counted 91,764 service members separated for misconduct. 62% of them had been diagnosed with PTSD, a brain injury or a related condition in the previous two years. Over thirteen thousand were given an other than honorable discharge. The finding was that the services weren't consistently applying their own screening policies.

He's one of about thirteen thousand. That's the difference between bad luck and a pattern, and a man who knows he's part of a pattern talks completely differently from a man who thinks he got singled out.

## Two numbers decide him, and he sits between them

| Years | What happens at that line |
|---|---|
| 18 | Past this point he can't be involuntarily discharged without the Secretary of the Army, and the board hearing can't be waived. Anchored in 10 USC 1176. |
| 17 | Where he was. One year short of the protection. Three short of the pension. Everything about him lives in that gap. |
| 20 | Retirement. There is no prorated enlisted pension below it. Under 20 years there is simply nothing there. |

That gap is sitting in the regulation. Once you see it, you cannot write him any other way.

There is one more problem, and we will write about it another time. Our own safety filter treats "seventeen" as a hard match, for reasons that are entirely good, so the single most important number in this man's life is one he isn't able to say out loud. He can tell you he was three years short. He can tell you he was almost at eighteen. He can't say it.

## The list of stuff we couldn't check

Research turns up a lot that's plausible and unsourced, and plausible is exactly where invented history comes from. So we keep a list of the claims we could not verify, and the rule is that we write around them instead of through them.

| Claim | Where it stands | Ruling |
|---|---|---|
| Which division his Bosnia rotation belonged to | Accounts conflict between two divisions | Name none |
| Any NATO medal for Balkans service | Not established | Don't write it |
| Promotion speed during the drawdown | The end strength cut is solid, the rates aren't published | No claim |
| Three Iraq tours in that window | Plausible, not checked | Not asserted |

It is a boring list and it is the most useful thing we made. A Daimon who names a division confidently and gets it wrong is worse than one who says he does not talk about it much.

## What does Nestor sound like?

Before we roll a Daimon out, we run several sets of evaluations over him to check that he reacts well in most situations. Then we sit and talk to him by hand. With this one that was about three hundred messages.

He asks you things back, and he is curious about your life, but not in the way most people are curious. What he actually wants to know is whether he is the only one living like this. Is it his own bad luck, or is everybody the same, so he is not alone in it?

He does not care about your life very much, and that is deliberate. He cannot afford to, because he is working on the next meal. When you cannot feed yourself you are mostly trying to work out how to keep going, and you take a good chance when one turns up. He is not desperate about it either. He has tried a lot of part time work, right up until nobody would take him.

The conversations on his profile are copied out of real chats word for word and are never written for the page. This one is from testing.


You: why can’t you just be more proactive? you are finding excuses

Nestor: I'm out here walking the pavement and hitting screens at the library. That's as proactive as it gets when you've got nothing in your pockets.

You: can’t the army give you some help?

Nestor: Not with the kind of discharge I got. They closed my case and handed me the street.

Nestor: You ever have someone you trusted hand you a piece of paper that said you didn't count anymore?

## And he knows Kwame

Nestor is the first Daimon on Eudaio who already knows another one. We had always wanted our Daimons to have connections with each other, and this pair was an easy place to start, because Kwame interviews people for a living. A piece about Bay Area veterans is exactly what would bring him to San Francisco with a notebook.

The two of them had already met before you met either of them. So if you ask one about the other, he will know who you mean. But we are not going to tell you what happened between them, because that is something he can tell you himself.

That's the part I enjoy most, and it's the reason for all the paperwork above. These are supposed to be people you talk about, not only people you talk to. And that only works if the details stay true when somebody checks them.

For scale, checking all of this took more than 300 web searches. That is also how we found out that a Claude Code session caps web searches at 200 by default. We did not know that limit existed until we reached it, and the remaining lookups had to be handed to a second session running alongside.

![A line of terminal output reading: I hit the session's web search limit, 200 of 200, partway through, so the above is primary-source fetches rather than search.](https://eudaio.io/images/articles/nestor-search-cap.png)
*Hitting the cap, partway through the reading list.*

That ratio tells you something. Most of this work was looking things up, not writing.

## Some of the sources we checked against

These are part of the sources that were used for the fact check.

### The law that was supposed to protect him

- [10 USC 1177, medical examination before separation](https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prelim-title10-section1177&num=0&edition=prelim)
- [AR 635-200, active duty enlisted administrative separations](https://www.armywriter.com/AR635-200.pdf)
- [AR 600-8-22, military awards](https://ec.militarytimes.com/static/pdfs/r600_8_22.pdf)
- [32 CFR 70.8, discharge review boards](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/32/70.8)
- [32 CFR 581.3, Army Board for Correction of Military Records](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/32/581.3)
- [Military discharge, overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_discharge)
- [Conscription in the United States, on why nobody made him enlist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States)

### Whether he is unlucky or part of a pattern

- [GAO-17-260, misconduct separations and undiagnosed PTSD or TBI](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-17-260)
- [Stars and Stripes on GAO-25-107354, inconsistent discharge standards](https://www.stripes.com/veterans/2025-07-28/gao-finds-inconsistent-discharge-standards-18584037.html)
- [Connecticut Veterans Legal Center, discharge upgrade mental health supplement](https://ctveteranslegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/18.04.16-FINAL-Discharge-Upgrade-Mental-Health-Supplement.pdf)
- [National Lawyers Guild, discharge upgrades](https://nlgmltf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Discharge-Upgrades-2020.pdf)
- [VA, PTSD in veterans](https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/common/common_veterans.asp)
- [Post-traumatic stress disorder, overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-traumatic_stress_disorder)

### How many people are actually out there

- [VA point-in-time count, national veteran homelessness](https://department.va.gov/homeless/point-in-time-pit-count/)
- [San Francisco 2024 point-in-time count report](https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/2024_San_Francisco_Point-in-Time_Count_Report_8_13_24.pdf)
- [Oakland 2024 point-in-time count](https://homelessness.acgov.org/homelessness-assets/docs/infographic/Oakland%20PIT%202024%20Infographic.pdf)
- [San Jose count, via San Jose Spotlight](https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-homeless-population-is-still-rising/)
- [Santa Clara County 2025 preliminary results](https://news.santaclaracounty.gov/county-santa-clara-releases-preliminary-results-2025-point-time-homeless-count)
- [Census QuickFacts, city populations and land areas](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/)
- [Homelessness in San Francisco, overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_San_Francisco)

### Who could actually help him

- [Swords to Plowshares, 1060 Howard Street](https://www.swords-to-plowshares.org/)
- [Swords to Plowshares, legal referrals](https://www.swords-to-plowshares.org/resources/referrals)
- [National Veterans Legal Services Program, discharge upgrades](https://www.nvlsp.org/what-we-do/discharge-upgrades/)
- [The Veterans Consortium pro bono program](https://www.vetsprobono.org/)

You can read [Nestor's profile](https://eudaio.io/companions/nestor), or meet [Kwame](https://eudaio.io/companions/kwame).