In 2024, a team of researchers mapped every single neuron in a fruit fly's brain -- all 139,255 of them, and the millions of connections between them. It was the first complete wiring diagram of an adult brain this complex. The work was led by Princeton and published in Nature (Dorkenwald et al. 2024).

This is that brain, running live in your browser.

The fly you see is not following a script. Its behavior -- walking, eating, grooming, startling, flying -- emerges from real neural signals propagating through those mapped connections. Watch closely: every turn, startle, and grooming pass is 139,000 neurons voting.

A fruit fly brain fits on a pinhead but contains circuits for memory, navigation, fear, hunger, and decision-making. If we can simulate this brain in a web browser today, imagine what becomes possible as we map larger brains. The human brain has 86 billion neurons. We are probably going to see it mapped in our lifetime.

This fly autonomously uses Workday. It cannot type and it cannot talk. Its only language is behavior, so an agent named Buzz reads its neural state and interprets what it sees: hunger becomes a meal voucher request, fatigue becomes a PTO request, curiosity becomes a career goal, and a fright becomes a workplace safety concern.

Buzz is an ambient agent. There is no chat window and nobody prompts it. It listens to an event stream, the fly's neural state arriving once per second, and it stays quiet until a signal crosses a threshold. Then it acts. And it never grants its own requests: everything Buzz files goes to a reviewer before anything happens. That review step is what makes agents like this safe to run unattended, whether the worker is a fly or a person.

Claude plays two roles. As the caretaker it tends to the enclosure, and as the fly's HR Partner in Workday it is that reviewer for everything Buzz files. Most requests are approved, some are denied, and approvals have real consequences: an approved meal voucher drops food in front of the fly, and approved PTO dims the lights so it can rest.

The Inbox panel on the left shows the whole conversation: what Buzz observed, what it filed, and how Claude ruled.