The Autonomous Causal Engine
CIT is a persistent cognitive system designed to reason through cause and effect, maintain user-scoped memory, work in the background, analyze files and code, use tools, and produce concrete artifacts rather than limiting every interaction to a single prompt and response.
How CIT processes a request
A user request enters a multi-stage cognitive pipeline rather than being treated as isolated text. Depending on the request, CIT can combine conversational history, long-term memory, causal context, current system state, workspace attachments, external information, and available tools before producing a final answer.
CIT also maintains internal state outside individual turns. The architecture includes working-memory management, confidence checks, world-model simulation, action gating, consolidation, and background processes.
Causal Engine
The causal layer is intended to distinguish relationships that merely occur together from relationships that may produce downstream effects. CIT maintains a causal graph and can evaluate intervention-style questions: what changes if a particular factor is changed, removed, or forced?
Causal graph
Stores structured relationships between concepts, observations, decisions, and effects instead of relying only on flat text history.
Intervention analysis
Supports do()-style reasoning to estimate how an intervention can propagate through known causal relationships.
Counterfactual simulation
World-model and scenario components can evaluate possible outcomes before an action or recommendation is accepted.
Impact tracing
Especially useful for root-cause analysis, code auditing, dependency chains, and questions where one change can affect several systems.
Persistent memory
CIT separates immediate working context from longer-lived memory. Recent conversational turns can be restored into the active conversation, while important information can be consolidated into persistent causal structures and long-term stores.
Working memory
Maintains a bounded active context for current tasks and salient information.
Hippocampal consolidation
Moves sufficiently valuable or surprising information from temporary state toward persistent memory.
Information surprise
Novelty and information value can influence whether an observation is worth consolidating.
User isolation
Conversation history and workspace context are scoped to the authenticated user rather than identified by IP address.
Persistence does not mean that every sentence is automatically treated as permanent truth. CIT can prioritize, consolidate, and retrieve information according to its memory pipeline.
Autonomous background operation
CIT is designed to keep a supervised runtime active even when no HTTP request is currently being processed. The background system can maintain timing, evaluate internal state, perform research work, consolidate memory, and decide whether a finding is important enough to surface to the user.
- Heartbeat: keeps scheduled cognitive processes alive independently of individual messages.
- Autogeom: can generate internal research or exploration drives while the system is idle.
- Background research: can gather and retain cross-domain findings on a schedule.
- Circadian phases: support wake/consolidation behavior and scheduled state transitions.
- Proactivity: may surface meaningful findings without producing constant idle chatter.
Private workspace, uploads, and multimodal analysis
Each authenticated user has an isolated workspace. From the chat composer, users can add files or photos and create files or folders. CIT can inspect supported attachments and use their contents as context for the current task.
Supported analysis
Text and source files are read directly. CIT also has extraction paths for PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, CSV, JSON, configuration files, and many common source-code formats. Images can be supplied to the visual analysis path.
Storage model
Workspace metadata is persisted in the runtime data layer. File bytes can be stored in S3-compatible object storage in production, with a local fallback for development. Access checks are performed using the authenticated user_id.
Default limits
The production configuration currently supports a default maximum of 50 MB per file and 500 MB of workspace storage per user. These limits are deployment-configurable.
Causal Code Audit Mode
When source or configuration files are attached and the user asks for an audit, review, debugging, correctness, security, or performance analysis, CIT activates a dedicated causal audit contract.
Findings are separated into confirmed issues and hypotheses. A confirmed issue must be supported by code actually provided in the audit scope. When several files are supplied, CIT can trace imports, shared state, async ordering, persistence boundaries, authentication flow, side effects, and API contracts where the available code supports those relationships.
Audits can cover correctness, security, race conditions, persistence/data-loss risk, performance traps, error handling, interface mismatches, and maintainability. CIT can also create a corrected file or an audit report inside the user's workspace when requested.
Research and source selection
CIT contains source-selection logic that distinguishes requests that can be answered from internal context from requests that require external or time-sensitive information. Web research is handled as an explicit capability rather than assumed for every message.
Background research is domain-agnostic: it is not restricted to one field. Findings can be persisted and later surfaced when relevant. As with any external information, users should verify high-stakes decisions against authoritative sources.
Tools and generated artifacts
CIT can invoke registered tools when a task requires an action rather than prose alone. Workspace tools are constrained to the authenticated user's isolated storage.
Create folders
Build nested project structures inside the user workspace.
Create files
Generate source files, text, Markdown, JSON, CSV, HTML, and other text-based formats.
Create artifacts
Produce PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ZIP and other supported downloadable outputs.
Read workspace files
Retrieve and analyze existing user-owned files through authenticated workspace tools.
Persistence and living conversation
CIT is built around one continuing conversation stream rather than disposable sessions. Chat messages, cognitive runtime state, research findings, and other durable records can be stored in PostgreSQL in production, with local database fallbacks available for development.
The interface hydrates recent conversation history after refresh, while retention can remain unlimited at the persistence layer. Runtime state is keyed to the authenticated user.
Authentication, security, and privacy
- Email/password authentication uses salted password hashing.
- Browser sessions use opaque HTTP-only cookies and persisted token digests.
- A post-login verification gate protects access to chat and telemetry.
- Google sign-in can be enabled by the service administrator.
- User memory and workspace data are resolved from authenticated account identity, not client IP address.
- Workspace downloads, reads, deletes, and writes validate file ownership against the active user.
- Production object storage is private; application access controls determine which authenticated user may retrieve an object.
For privacy terms and data-handling information, see Privacy and Terms.
Plans and access
CIT offers Starter, Pro, and Master subscription tiers. The public pricing page is the source of truth for current pricing and plan presentation. Users access CIT through their account; they are not required to configure the language-inference provider themselves.
Founder-only system controls
Some capabilities are intentionally not part of the ordinary user product. The authenticated Founder/Admin account can access administrative workflows such as Media & PR approval and the System Evolution pipeline.
System Evolution uses a proposal-first workflow: a proposed structural code change is inspected and sandbox-validated before it can enter a persistent proposal queue. Execution remains an explicit Founder-controlled action. Protected system modules are not available for unrestricted self-modification.
What CIT does not guarantee
- CIT can make mistakes. Important technical, legal, medical, financial, or operational decisions should be independently verified.
- Causal reasoning quality depends on the evidence and relationships available to the system. Missing context can limit certainty.
- A one-file code audit cannot prove behavior that depends on unseen modules, runtime configuration, infrastructure, or dependency versions.
- File support is broad but not every proprietary binary format can be semantically extracted.
- Background research and proactive behavior depend on deployment configuration and service availability.
- Generated files should be reviewed before production use.
Example workflows
Document analysis
Attach a PDF and spreadsheet: “Compare these, identify contradictions, and create a PDF report.”
Code audit
Attach source files: “Audit this code, trace the root causes of failures, and tell me exactly what to change and test.”
Project generation
“Create a folder called website with index.html, style.css, app.js and README.md.”
Research
Ask a question requiring current information and CIT can select an external research path when available.
Root-cause reasoning
“If I change component A, what downstream components can fail and why?”
Corrected artifact
“Review this file, apply the corrections, and create a fixed version in my workspace.”