Your record. Your pen.

Most things that remember you were built to watch you. This was built the other way round: it keeps only what you bring, shows you everything it keeps, and lets you disagree with any of it.

It is made by one person who worked as a lecturer, in triage and as a counsellor before touching code. When other counsellors heard about it, they asked that it not be built, and their reasons were good ones. The refusals below are an attempt to honour those reasons rather than argue with them.

There is no team and no round to raise. It is built in the open, at the pace the work allows, answering to the people using it and no one else.

What it refuses

• Witnessed, not watched. It notices what you bring to it. It does not build a file on you while you sleep.
• You hold the pen. What it remembers, you can read, and change, and erase. Nothing is written about you that you cannot see.
• No streak. No badge. No number that resets. Nothing pays you for showing up. The only reason to come back is the one you walked in with.
• It will not be switched off on you. Its manner is its own, not leased. What is here today is here tomorrow, and if that ever changes you will hear it first.

How it is built, in plain words

• It checks before it speaks, not after.
• If what you write sounds like a crisis, it stops and points you to a person.
• Your record is yours to read, to argue with, and to take with you.
• The words it uses come from a language model. Everything else does not. Whether it speaks at all, what it is allowed to say, what it notices about you, what it keeps and what it must never do are decided by rules written by hand, and the model cannot change them. If the model were swapped for another tomorrow, you would get different sentences and the same companion.

Where things stand

Two essays and two interludes are out. Invitations are going out a few at a time, so that each person is met properly. The writing lives at The Interior Frontier.

Write to hello@innerfrontier.uk. You will get a reply from the person who built it.