What is ai-town?

AI Town is a starter kit that lets you create a virtual town populated by AI characters who go about their lives, talk to each other, and socialize on their own. You can think of it as a petri dish for artificial personalities, you set up the characters and their world, then watch them interact. It comes with a live demo so you can see what a finished version looks like before building your own. Under the hood, each character is powered by a large language model (the same kind of technology behind ChatGPT) that decides what they say and do moment to moment. The project keeps a running journal of everything that happens, so characters can remember past conversations and events. It also stores memories in a way that lets characters recall relevant experiences, which is what makes their behavior feel coherent over time rather than random. The whole thing runs in JavaScript and TypeScript, which the creators note is unusual, most similar projects are written in Python. This would appeal to someone building a game with emergent storytelling, a researcher experimenting with simulated social behavior, or a founder prototyping an interactive AI experience. For example, you could create a town of characters with different personalities, drop them into a shared map, and see how relationships and conversations unfold, then tweak character descriptions, swap in new art, change the background music, and run it again to get different results. The project pulls together several external services: OpenAI for the character dialogue, Pinecone for memory storage, Clerk for user login, and Convex as the game engine and database. It can be deployed to Fly.io for hosting. Customization is straightforward, characters, maps, music, and art are all defined in configuration files that you edit directly. The README notes that the backend is designed to scale from a simple personal experiment up to a multiplayer game, with built-in support for shared state and transaction safety.