Sense is the afferent open standard — the always-on, deterministic,
energy-accounted record of what is happening around an agent, and a
governed account of when that is worth attention. The tool protocols
(MCP/A2A/ACP) standardize an agent reaching OUT for capabilities; Sense
standardizes the observations flowing IN, the substrate every ambient/
proactive agent needs but none specify.
Distinct from OpenTelemetry GenAI: that traces the agent's own reasoning
(efferent, non-deterministic by its own admission); Sense records the
world the agent is in (afferent), deterministically, every datum
provenance- and trust-tagged, every interruption priced in joules and
sealed in a receipt.
Four tiers, deterministic-first, inference last:
- sense-schema — content-addressed Event, vendor-neutral SourceClass,
TrustLevel, family Energy/Provenance, StateProjection, Highlight.
- sense-store — content-addressed, HLC-ordered, replay-deterministic
log; two runs over the same events yield a byte-identical digest.
- sense-attention — deterministic salience/novelty/uncertainty observer,
k-sigma highlight detector, and the attention budget that gates
surfacing by value-vs-interruption-cost (displacement + interference),
priced in joules. Perception ⊗ attention-budget — the afferent dual of
JCP's capability ⊗ joule-budget.
- sense-cascade — query envelope + deterministic recall retrieval +
speculative cascade that answers factual recall with zero LLM calls
and escalates only as a last resort.
- sense-receipt — hash-chained Ed25519 surfacing log (allows AND holds
chained); JCR-1 COSE_Sign1 for cross-family verification.
SPEC §1-§10, conformance C1-C5 with a reproducible vector pack, a
sense-cli end-to-end demo. 38 tests green, clippy clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
e0610c90cd