On 8 October Likeness House was a plan in a document. On 9 October it had a name, a domain, a site in English and Russian, a client account and an admin panel. This note covers what Likeness House is, why I started with my own portrait, and how the site is put together.
What Likeness House is
Likeness House builds your digital twin around your memories, voice, appearance and way of thinking. The events that shaped you. The decisions you made. The stories you have only ever told out loud. You choose what goes in and what stays private. The idea is to preserve something of yourself in history, in a form you and the people you choose can return to and speak with.
Imagine your twin years from now. You add a memory, a conversation, a new chapter of your life. Its portrait looks back at you. You hear your own voice. As technology advances, the ambition is for it to draw more closely on the way you think, become your personal assistant and carry out tasks for you. A digital presence that can travel through time, for as long as people and technology keep going. That is the future I am building toward.
The work begins with the material you choose to share. For the Portrait package, we plan ten to twelve hours of interviews and thirty stories for your review. You approve what enters the archive and how your voice and portrait are represented. Your words and decisions form the basis of the twin's answers. Original recordings stay separate from generated responses, so there is a record to check them against.
Why I started with my own portrait
I started with my own portrait. The face on the home page is mine, made of points of light. It gives a visible form to what I want to build: a digital copy with a person's memories, voice and way of thinking.
That choice makes the project personal. I want to preserve my own experience too.
A portrait that looks back
The portrait is not a video. It is a 2.5D relief of my face drawn as thousands of points in WebGL. It gathers when the page opens, blinks, breathes and follows the cursor. The eyes move on their own, and the head turns a little on the neck, the way a person turns toward a voice. A few seconds after the cursor stops, it looks straight ahead again.
On a phone there is no cursor, so the portrait drifts slowly by itself. There is a pause button, and the animation stops when it scrolls out of view, to reduce battery use.
The engine started in Pulsara, my voice assistant, and grew into a desktop portrait for this project. For the web I tuned the point density, warmed the colours and made it light enough to run on a phone.
What the client sees
Three packages, with prices on the site:
- Portrait: €15,000, then €290 a month. Interviews, thirty stories, the voice, the portrait of light and a printed book.
- Legacy: €30,000, then €490 a month. Twenty-four hours of interviews, sixty stories, access for up to ten people.
- Private: from €60,000, then from €990 a month. Installed on the client's own hardware.
The prices are public. A client should know the number before the first call.
A request needs no registration. A private account lets the client follow requests submitted while signed in: received, consultation, proposal, agreement, complete. Messages to me go from the same page. Guest requests stay with me for follow-up by email.
Behind it sits an admin panel in Russian. I see every request there, change its status, keep notes the client never sees, and reply. The reply shows up in the client's account.
How it is built
No framework and no dependencies. A small Node.js server renders both languages on the server, so search engines read the English and the Russian pages in full. I learned that lesson on a robot catalog where Google could read one language out of four.
Passwords are hashed with scrypt, sessions live in HttpOnly cookies, and forms are checked for origin, rate-limited and carry a trap for bots. The site runs on Railway with a persistent volume, at likenesshouse.com. A shared link shows a large preview banner in messengers.
The code was written with AI coding assistants under my direction and review: Codex built the portrait engine, Claude built the site.
What I held to
Every text went through a check for AI clichés. There are no placeholders, no coming-soon blocks and no testimonials, because there are no clients yet to quote. The buttons have sharp corners. The tone is quiet on purpose: we take on a small number of twins each year, and the site says so in one line.
What comes next
The site is open for private consultations. Telegram already notifies me about new requests and registrations. Email delivery through Resend is the next integration; the site currently queues outgoing messages on its persistent storage. Next come the first client interviews.
To see the portrait move, open likenesshouse.com on a computer and move your mouse.
Originally published on ilinmaks.com.
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