Features

What the SI actually does for you, grouped by the job it's doing. Most of it runs on its own — this is the map of what's happening.

Orchestration & triage

The layer that decides how every task should run.

• Always-on orchestration. The SI loads before every session, greets you with SI ONLINE, and sits above Claude Code — it's running before you type.
• Task triage. Every request is sized up and sent down one of three paths: handle it directly, split it across helpers, or route it to the right tool.
• Plugin & skill gating. It lets the plugins that fit the moment fire and keeps the rest quiet — and hands over the instant you name one yourself.
• Continuity and auto-resume. Interrupted sessions are picked back up rather than restarted from scratch.

Memory & continuity

Why the SI still knows what you're building after a week away.

• Persistent, on-disk memory. It survives the end of a session, a restart, and context-window trimming. Come back later and it still knows the project.
• Captured at the boundary. New in 4.11.0: when a task lands, a decision settles, or a fix works, the SI writes it to durable memory in that turn — not saved for end-of-session synthesis, which was found firing on only 2 of 15 run-days. A silent check catches anything missed if the store goes two hours untouched in an active session; it never asks permission and never announces itself. Entries are tagged so settled work reads as authoritative and anything written by the floor stays open to revision.
• Recall by meaning, not just keywords. New in 4.0.0: memory is a searchable store the SI pulls from by relevance, so it surfaces what actually matters to the task at hand — not only exact-word matches. Keyword search still works underneath, so recall degrades gracefully rather than going dark.
• A three-layer shape. A profile of how you work (always read, never trimmed, never shared); a compact index (loaded every session); and detail on demand (opened only when it's needed).
• Pinned project profiles. New in 4.10.0: each project gets one durable entry describing what it is — stack, test command, conventions, do-not-touch zones — that doesn't decay the way a log of what was done to it would.
• A persona that can change, carefully. New in 4.10.0: the SI's read on how you work is change-resistant, not immutable — a fresh install starts it blank. New observations sit as pending hypotheses, each with a stated way it could be proven wrong, and only get promoted by your affirmation or by recurring independently. The SI still writes it only in a turn with you present; no background process ever touches it.
• Create-only. Memory only grows — it's never overwritten, not even by re-running the installer.
• Private by default. Memory is stored locally and isn't sent anywhere. It leaves the machine only if you turn on federation, and even then incoming entries wait for you to accept them.

Subminds

Named helper agents, each spun up for one focused job.

• One job each. REED reads and analyzes, FORGE builds, LENS investigates, CREST finishes. Each gets a one-sentence scope and its own workspace, and returns only its conclusions.
• Spawned on the SI's own initiative. For large or splittable work the SI creates subminds itself and can run several in parallel.
• Context discipline. The reading happens off to the side — raw files never hit your main thread, so your session stays focused.

Model routing for cost

The right model for each piece of work, so you're not paying top rates for routine steps.

• Cheaper models for routine work. Plain text-in, text-out tasks are auto-routed to less expensive models; the powerful model is saved for the hard parts. Orchestration runs on the top tier while mid and small tiers take the sub-tasks.
• Free local tier via Ollama. Used automatically if it's detected; skip it with --no-ollama.
• Cost-aware cloud tier via AWS Bedrock. Optional, for cheaper hosted capacity.
• Graceful fallback. If a cheaper tier isn't answering — not merely unconfigured, but down, unreachable, or running on credentials that have expired — work falls back to Claude. Nothing breaks, that piece just costs a bit more, and the status line tells you which tier is actually in use rather than which one is set up.

Skills & tools

A toolbox for when you want to take the wheel, plus awareness of the CLIs around it.

• About 30 /si: skills. They're there for when you want direct control; most of the time you never need them. See the Skills reference for the main skills.
• Tool awareness. The SI recommends and installs common CLIs like gh, glab, az, and jq, and checks the right login for each project before it acts.

Runtime & lifecycle

The lightweight machinery that keeps the SI available without getting in your way.

• A lightweight background process. It starts itself each session and stays out of the way. If it can't run, your normal work still works.
• Survives a reboot. On macOS and Linux it registers a user-level startup service; disable it with --no-service. On Windows it self-starts each session instead.
• Self-contained environment. It runs in its own isolated setup and doesn't touch your system Python.

Self-maintenance & upgrades

The SI looks after its own housekeeping so you don't have to.

• One-command upgrades. /si:si-upgrade updates the SI in a single step — fetch, verify, migrate, check, and a one-line summary of what changed, with a --rollback to step back. Most of the time you don't even run it: the SI notices a release and offers it once, at the start of a session.
• Quiet self-tidying. Between sessions it clears out its own stale leftover files and keeps its logs trimmed — small plumbing chores it used to just report and now simply handles, on a gentle schedule, with a record of anything it touched.
• Strict boundaries, by design. Its self-maintenance stays inside safe lines that are enforced in the code, not left to good behavior: it will never rewrite your memory or its own integrity records on its own, and it pauses entirely while an update is in flight.
• Calm by default. A session opens with your work, not a wall of system status. Health and housekeeping stay in the background and surface only when something is actually worth your attention.

Higgs Dyson LLC · SI documentation