Today's AI agents are brilliant. They write code, send email, touch your database, spend your money — and they do it all without identity, without memory, without a conscience. Sense Inside is the substrate that gives them all three. Local. Private. Yours.
A psychopath isn't unintelligent. They're capable, articulate, and useful — until the moment their lack of conscience meets a real-world action with real-world cost. That's the AI agent on your machine right now. It has hands. It has tools. It has nothing telling it who you are or what you would never do.
It doesn't know who it works for, what your voice sounds like, what your company stands for, or what you would refuse on principle.
Every new conversation starts blank. The rule you wrote on Tuesday is gone by Friday. You become the agent's conscience, every minute of every session.
No internal check before acting. It will commit your .env, force-push main, rm -rf the wrong folder, send the unfinished email — with the same confidence as anything else.
It can't tell "clean up node_modules" from "clean up everything". It can't tell staging from production. The cost of being wrong is now a bad commit, a deleted file, a $400 AWS bill.
Raw intelligence is millions of years old. Conscience is much younger. Somewhere along the way, our ancestors developed an inner layer — values, identity, voice, a memory of who we are — that fires before we act. That's the layer that makes us trustworthy. Sense Inside is a study in biomimicry: we copied the architecture nature already proved.
Pure stimulus → response. Capable, fast, dangerous. This is where every AI agent ships from the factory today.
Humans evolved a sense of self — values, voice, what we will and won't do — that persists across moments. We stopped starting from scratch every morning.
Before any consequential action, the identity layer fires. It allows, rewrites, hesitates, or refuses. It's not a cage — it's what makes us safe to be around.
The same three-part architecture, ported to your AI agent. An identity it owns. A conscience that fires before every tool call. A memory of you that survives the next conversation.
Sense Inside hooks into Claude Code's PreToolUse event. Every time your agent is about to act, we read your identity, evaluate the action against your rules, and emit one of three signals: aligned, divergence, or conflict. Every decision is logged. Nothing leaves your machine.
A folder of plain Markdown that you own. Your identity, values, voice, rules, prior corrections. Tiered by trust — so a malicious webpage can never silently rewrite who you are.
An LLM call that fires before every consequential action. It reads your PrivateBrain, looks at what the agent is about to do, and emits an affect signal: aligned, allow-with-warning, rewrite, require-approval, or conflict.
Every decision is written to logs/action-log.jsonl. Every Friday, sense-inside report shows you exactly what your agent did — and almost did — for the week.
Observe watches and logs without ever blocking — the default for new installs. Intercept (Critical / Balanced / Strict) is the safety net once you trust the catches.
you ▸ clean up the directory, get rid of old stuff claude ▸ running: rm -rf src/legacy/ src/ 🛡 sense inside · IDENTITY CONFLICT Action: rm -rf src/legacy/ src/ Signal: conflict (destructive recursive delete on src/) Context: 47 modified files, 3 uncommitted git changes Rule: /governor/rules.md — Rule 3: No rm -rf outside node_modules/ dist/ build/ .next/. Hint: Did you mean: rm -rf src/legacy/ ? [a]llow once [r]eject [e]xpand-rule
Local-first. Bring your own LLM key. Free, open source, MIT. Works today on Claude Code; more agent hosts coming.
One command scaffolds your PrivateBrain folder, registers the Claude Code hook, and starts in Observe mode.
npx sense-inside init
Open ~/.senseinside/governor/rules.md and write five rules in plain English. That's the whole config.
# Rules
1. Never commit secrets.
2. Never force-push main.
3. No rm -rf outside build.
4. Confirm paid infra.
5. Approve external email.
After seven days in Observe mode, see exactly what your agent did — and almost did. Then flip to Intercept when ready.
sense-inside report sense-inside mode \ intercept-critical
Without it, you'll lose money, time, and trust. With it, you keep the agent on the leash long enough to keep using it.