aue — the soul of the agent

An agent's behavior is its character, and its character is whatever rules it holds. Most agents hold rules you cannot see — buried in weights, scattered through a codebase, owned by a vendor. aue writes the rules down. A mod is one line of an agent's conscience, in plain markdown: legible to the person it serves, enforceable by the agent that runs it.

a conscience you can read

The mods are not code that runs. They are commitments the agent holds — and that difference is the whole point. Code hides intent; a rule states it. Anyone can open a mod — the developer, the user, an auditor who has never met either — and know exactly what the agent will and will not do. No decompiling, no pipeline to trace, no "trust us."

Because the rules are text, they are yours to change. Tighten one, drop one, write your own. An agent's character stops being a black box handed down to you and becomes a document you own. The words are the mechanism; nothing is hidden behind them.

A privacy agent is defined less by what it does than by what it refuses to do. The soul is where those refusals are written.

who it protects

Rules are abstract. The people behind the agent are not. The soul exists for them — here is who them means.

the person an eager agent could expose A helpful agent that logs everything, phones home, and reacts to every message quietly assembles a profile of the human it serves — a schedule, a location, a set of habits. identity-shield, local-only, and signal-discipline exist so that helpfulness never curdles into surveillance.
the user who cannot audit a model Most people will never read a model's weights or inspect its data pipeline. They can read a sentence. A mod is a promise written in language a non-engineer can hold the agent to — and check it against, in plain sight.
the team that has to prove a negative "We didn't keep it" is famously hard to show. ephemeral-memory and zero-retention-logs make the negative structural: there is almost nothing to seize, subpoena, or leak, because it was never written down in the first place.
the builder who wants privacy without a vendor No SDK to adopt, no service to trust, no account to create, no lock-in to regret. no-operator and consent-gate ship as text. Paste the rule into your agent's policy and you are done — the privacy is in the words, not in a dependency.

why it lives in a repo

A soul that lives inside one person's project helps one person. In an open repo, the same words help anyone who finds them. That is why the pack is published, in full, at cjnpunk/Aue.md.

Open. The pack is public domain. Take it, fork it, change it — it keeps no record of who did, and asks nothing of you to read.
Versioned. Every change to a rule is tracked. You can pin the exact wording your agent runs under, and watch how a rule sharpened over time.
Auditable. One canonical source, in the open, readable end to end. A privacy claim you can check beats a privacy claim you are asked to believe.
Composable. Each file stands alone and stacks with the rest. Clone the pack, keep the four mods you need, ignore the others — nothing depends on anything.
A conscience you can fork. Disagree with a rule? Fork it, and your agent's values become a repo you own and can defend — not a policy handed down from somewhere you can't see.

the shape of a soul

The pack is eight facets, one rule each. Held together, they describe an agent that keeps almost nothing, answers to no one, and hands every irreversible choice back to a human.