We believe mental well‑being is a human right. We believe privacy is a prerequisite for dignity. We believe intelligence should be a public good. And we believe software can do more than run — it can heal, learn, and evolve in service of human flourishing.
Lucy in the Loop is our audacious commitment to these beliefs: a privacy‑first, fully local, self‑evolving companion for mental health and performance — built in the open, governed with radical transparency, and aligned to human values from first principles.
- A silent crisis: Billions live with stress, anxiety, trauma, burnout, and loneliness. Access to care is scarce, expensive, and uneven.
- A broken bargain: The modern web often trades well‑being for engagement and privacy for convenience.
- A different path: We choose local‑first AI that works for you, answers to you, and lives with you — not above you and never behind your back.
- Universal access, zero extraction: World‑class, evidence‑informed support that runs entirely on your device. No cloud dependence by default. Your data is your sovereignty.
- 99/1 autonomy with accountability: Approximately 99% autonomous operation with 1% human oversight for ethics, safety, and policy. Every significant action is explainable, logged, reversible, and under your control.
- Self‑improving care: A society of specialized agents that learn, test, and safely improve themselves over time — with kill‑switches, audit trails, and consensus safeguards by design.
- Open source for collective benefit: An open ecosystem where clinicians, researchers, engineers, and citizens co‑create a compassionate intelligence for all.
- Autonomy: You choose. Consent is explicit. Overrides are instant. The user is always the highest authority.
- Non‑maleficence: Do no harm. When uncertain, pause, verify, and escalate. Safety outranks novelty.
- Justice: Built for everyone. We test for bias, measure equity, and fix regressions as critical bugs.
- Transparency: No dark corners. Explanations on request. Immutable, user‑owned logs by default.
- Privacy: Local‑first, data‑minimizing, encrypted at rest. No unapproved data egress. Ever.
- Compassion: Evidence‑based skills delivered with humility, warmth, and unconditional positive regard.
- Accountability: Every agent, every update, every decision — traceable, reversible, and reviewable.
- Community: Open code, open governance, open critique. We welcome scrutiny and we improve in public.
Lucy is a modular “society of agents” collaborating under an orchestrator with explicit guardrails:
- Safety Stack: Dedicated risk detection, filtering, and escalation pathways that prioritize user welfare.
- Explainability by default: Rationale capture and “Why did you do that?” interfaces for meaningful oversight. See the Transparent Autonomy Policy.
- Kill‑switches and rollbacks: One action to halt; one action to revert. Safety is an affordance, not an afterthought.
- Least‑privilege everything: Sandboxed agents, zero‑trust data access, signed updates, and verified provenance.
- Local adaptation: On‑device personalization to what helps you — not what grows someone else’s metrics.
Refer to these living documents for specifics: Ethics & Compliance Manifesto, Transparent Autonomy Policy, Security & Data Protection Policy, and Failsafe & Kill Switch Protocols.
- To individuals: We will respect your time, your attention, and your boundaries. We’ll be useful, honest about limits, and quiet when you ask.
- To clinicians: We are an adjunct for skill practice and continuity — never a substitute for care. We design for auditability and handoffs.
- To developers: We will keep the stack clear, composable, testable, and forkable. We will favor local performance, integrity, and readability over hype.
- To researchers: We will translate evidence into accessible protocols. We will invite replication and publish negative results where relevant.
- To society: We will not build extractive systems. No dark patterns. No surveillance business models. No engagement traps.
- Safety: Adverse event rate, crisis response conformance, and time‑to‑halt. Target: zero unmitigated harms.
- Equity: Outcome parity across demographics; fairness tests baked into CI.
- Privacy: Data egress incidents (target: zero). Encryption coverage and key hygiene.
- Efficacy: Symptom reduction and well‑being gains in opt‑in evaluations; transparent methodology.
- Autonomy with oversight: Auditability, reversibility, and human‑in‑the‑loop adherence for critical actions.
- We will not trade user data for features.
- We will not ship ambiguous safety controls.
- We will not obscure limitations or inflate claims.
- We will not prioritize engagement over well‑being.
Phase by phase, we will move from a capable, private companion to a continuously improving ecosystem — always guarded by transparency, consent, and control. We aspire to a world where anyone, anywhere, can access effective, culturally sensitive mental health skills without giving up privacy or agency. If we succeed, “software that cares” becomes infrastructure for human thriving.
If you are an engineer, clinician, designer, researcher, or simply someone who believes technology should protect what makes us human — help us. Review code. Propose safeguards. Add skills. Write tests. Translate protocols. Audit bias. Improve docs. File ethical concerns. This is a commons of care; your hands shape it.
Contribute via CONTRIBUTING.md and our issue templates. Read the Roadmap. Hold us to account.
This manifesto is a pledge of intent, not a guarantee of outcome. Lucy in the Loop is wellness software, not a clinician, not a diagnostic device, and not an emergency service. Use is voluntary and at your own risk. For medical concerns, seek licensed professionals. In emergencies, contact local emergency services immediately. See: DISCLAIMER, MEDICAL DISCLAIMER, TERMS, and Privacy Policy.
Lucy is open‑source under Apache 2.0; outputs are governed by OUTPUTS-LICENSE.md.
Build the first truly private, transparent, self‑improving AI that helps people suffer less and flourish more — and prove that autonomy, safety, and compassion can scale together.
We will not solve everything. But together, we can bend the trajectory of AI toward care.
— The Lucy in the Loop Community