e0610c90cd
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]>
74 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
74 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
# Sense
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The **ambient context** standard — the always-on, deterministic, energy-accounted
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record of *what is happening around an agent*, and a principled account of *when
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that is worth attention*.
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The tool protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) standardized the **efferent** half of an agent:
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reaching out for tools, peers, payments. Sense standardizes the **afferent** half
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— the observations flowing in. It is the substrate an *ambient* or *proactive*
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agent needs but none of them specify: a feed of the world, deterministic enough to
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audit, with a governed decision about when to interrupt a human.
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Where OpenTelemetry traces the agent's own reasoning — non-deterministic by its
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own admission, and about the agent's *insides* — Sense records the agent's
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*outside*, deterministically, with every datum provenance- and trust-tagged, and
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every interruption priced in joules and sealed in a receipt.
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## The four tiers
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```
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observe ─▶ project ─▶ detect ─▶ gate ─▶ seal ─▶ verify ─▶ answer
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│ │ │ │ │ │ │
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store attention attention attention receipt receipt cascade
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```
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- **`sense-schema`** — the wire types: the content-addressed [`Event`], the
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vendor-neutral `SourceClass`, the `TrustLevel`, the family `Energy`/`Provenance`
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model, the `StateProjection`, the `Highlight`. Pure, no IO.
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- **`sense-store`** — a content-addressed, HLC-ordered, **replay-deterministic**
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event log. Two runs over the same events yield a byte-identical digest.
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- **`sense-attention`** — the part no observability stack carries: a deterministic
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salience/novelty/uncertainty observer, a *k*-sigma highlight detector, and the
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**attention budget** that gates surfacing by *value vs. interruption cost*,
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priced in joules. "Perception ⊗ attention-budget", the afferent dual of JCP's
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"capability ⊗ joule-budget".
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- **`sense-cascade`** — the synthesis tier: a query envelope, deterministic recall
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retrieval, and a speculative cascade that answers factual-recall queries with
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**zero LLM calls** and escalates to a frontier model only as a last resort.
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- **`sense-receipt`** — a hash-chained, Ed25519-signed **surfacing log**: the
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tamper-evident record of what was surfaced (or held), when, and what it cost.
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Sealable as a JCR-1 COSE_Sign1 envelope for cross-family verification.
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See [`SPEC.md`](SPEC.md) for the normative standard and
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[`conformance/v1/`](conformance/v1/) for the reproducible vector pack.
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## Try it
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```sh
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cd sense-rs
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cargo run -p sense-cli --bin sense # the whole loop on a scripted stream
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cargo test --workspace # the conformance suite
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```
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The demo scripts an ambient stream (a quiet shell baseline, a burst of file
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changes, a low-trust log line), then for each surfaced moment prints the
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projection, the gate decision, and the joules it cost — then verifies the
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hash-chained surfacing log and answers a recall query with no model call.
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## What is **not** here
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- **A daemon, sensors, or a UI.** A host wires its platform's sensors to the
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`SourceClass` vocabulary and renders highlights however it likes. Sense fixes the
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datum, the determinism, the attention decision, and the receipt — not the
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plumbing.
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- **A model.** The salience observer and the synthesis fallback are *recognized
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edges*; the reference observer is deterministic and the reference fallback is a
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recorder. A host brings the model it trusts.
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- **A transport or storage engine.** The wire is `serde`/JCR-1; the order is the
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HLC. Ride it over anything; persist it in anything that preserves the order.
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## Licence
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Specification text: CC-BY-4.0 ([`LICENSE-SPEC`](LICENSE-SPEC)). Reference
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implementation in `sense-rs/`: Apache-2.0 ([`LICENSE`](LICENSE)).
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