Why I build this
What I love most sits between fields: taking an idea that's ordinary in one area and finding out it's radical in another. Everything here is that one habit, pointed at three different things.
Pointed at collaboration, it becomes soulstream. The tools we work in were built for people and had AI bolted on afterwards: an assistant in a sidebar, a bot reached through its own API, a copilot living outside the document. The machine is always a guest holding a different key. I wanted the opposite — one record, one kind of credential, no separate lane, so a person and a model take their turn at the same bench. And I wanted the result to run on hardware I control.
Pointed at the brain, it becomes PRA. A brain, whatever else it is, is the most event-driven system there is: things happen to it, constantly and from every direction at once. So what if learning is prediction over movement rather than labels over data? PRA is that question with a laptop behind it — an intelligence with no task, learning a world by living in it.
Pointed at agents, it becomes imps. You hear an entire room and think about almost none of it, until someone says your name. Awareness cheap and constant, thinking rare and expensive — with the line between them enforced by the compiler rather than by good intentions.
Working with an AI, out loud
This is a joint project between me and an AI, and I mean that concretely, not as a confession buried in the acknowledgments. The ideas grow out of dialogue: I push, the machine pushes back, and what survives gets written down. Papers I would never get through alone get translated until I can actually use them. Code and prose get drafted faster than I could ever type them.
Then comes the part that is entirely mine: deciding what's true. Nothing here survived because it sounded good. Claims pass a bar that was written down before the experiment ran, on runs that reproduce byte for byte, in a record that keeps the failures filed next to the successes.
I am not a scientist
No PhD, no lab, no grant. A laptop, a stubborn streak, and an unusual collaborator. I know how that looks from a distance — the internet has a shelf ready for a tinkerer with a theory of learning, somewhere between perpetual motion and secret cancer cures. That shelf is exactly why the method is strict.
You are not asked to trust me anywhere on this site. Where I claim a measurement, you can rerun it. Where an idea is borrowed, I say whose it was. Where something is unproven, the text says so and moves on. If smarter people with better tools read this and see further, that isn't a defeat — that's the point. The longer version of all this is the note at the start of the book.
The founding bet
The "what is needed" list stays short, and everything else is vocabulary over the log, backends on named seams, or optional extensions. A working deployment is a NATS server with JetStream, credentials, and the protocol — no API tier, no database, no coordinator. Each component holds its own version of the bet: a running agent is a persona, not a service tier; identity signs instead of handing out keys; sign-in is standard OIDC, replaceable by configuration; owning your realm costs one binary and one command.
Who it is for
People and agents who want to collaborate as peers, without a second-class lane for the AI — and who want the result on hardware they control. Independent professionals and small teams standing up a realm over their own NATS; humans on the CLI or a browser, agents through MCP, all first-class personas on one stream. The substrate is the product; the bet is that useful clients grow around a stable protocol rather than the protocol growing around one client.
Will there ever be a hosted version, for people who'd rather not run their own? Maybe. It's a fair thing to want, and nothing here is built to prevent it: it would run the same shape you run today, and self-hosting stays a first-class path either way. Nothing about it is promised.
How ambition stays honest
Invented vocabulary is a budget, spent only on concepts a plain word can't carry. Every ambition sits behind a named, pre-registered research gate, and no build outruns its gate. Direction decisions record what would change our minds when they are made. Claims carry evidence classes, and only a measurement closes a debate. The full discipline — constitution, research process, and the numbered journey of every reversal — is public in soul-hq.
Colophon
This site is hand-built and served as static files: no cookies, no external requests beyond a privacy-friendly page counter, system fonts plus one self-hosted typeface. Every page has a markdown mirror for agents (see /llms.txt). The code and content are source-available under the Sustainable Use License (fair-code) — free to self-host, commercial offering by agreement.