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Before an AI agent acts: a shared contract for intent, provenance and evidence

I maintain PIC Standard (Provenance & Intent Contracts), an Apache-2.0 protocol for making AI agent actions checkable before they happen.

  • PIC Standard ensures AI agent actions are checkable before execution
  • Proposal includes intent, impact class, provenance, claims, and evidence
  • Verifier checks proposal, resulting in allow, block, or require-more-evidence

An offline voice agent for my terminal in 52 MB (Whistle + Needle)

Two of the biggest Hacker News threads this week were about Whistle, a 16.9 MB speech-to-text model, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.

  • Whistle, a 16.9 MB speech-to-text model, enables voice interface on terminal
  • DeepSeek V4.1 Flash serves as backup model for voice agent
  • Combined Whistle and Needle models occupy 52 MB disk space

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