Insei: Ghost in the Shell

Every other XR shell tries to be a better desktop. Insei is a better mind.

Insei (隕星, meteorite) is a local-first voice familiar for Linux: the ghost in the XR shell now taking shape. The portfolio is the shooting star; she is what survives the fall and lands in your hand: an ore from both outside and inside this world, stone on one side and signal on the other, the two realities interfacing through her. You speak; she listens, understands, and acts, and she addresses her builder only as sensei. Seeded from the Valence archive. She outgrew the name.

The pillars

1. Rituals, not gestures: voice commands as deliberate spoken rituals, not memorized hand waves.
2. The shell is alive: Insei herself is the quiet familiar, the presence you talk to.
3. Time as a place: the interface treats time spatially.
4. The room breathes with you: focus-state input (Muse headband) shapes the environment.
5. Breach vision: a bug-bounty security layer woven into the shell itself.
6. Poetry in the walls: the interface speaks back in language worth reading.

The engineering (ground zero, verified)

• Full voice loop, live on Linux: a Whisper tiny.en pipeline with a vocabulary-biased prompt hears the wake word (“Insei,” also heard as “in say” / “insey”), dispatches the command, and the niri compositor backend switches the live workspace. Verified end-to-end: spoken “insei, zen” → insei mode zen → the room changes.
• Real audio engineering: device selection via INSEI_MIC_DEVICE, S16/S24/S32 format fallback for finicky USB mics, peak-normalization to 0.95 so quiet mics still hear.
• 132-test suite green. Fresh repo, one clean seed commit, roadmap-driven.
• Local-first by doctrine: nothing leaves the machine. No cloud, no accounts, no telemetry.

What is next

The persona layer: the familiar, not just the interface. Then her home: the jurai-shell, built as the ship she will inhabit. And the crown, when it arrives, takes the whole thing XR.

Status: ground zero. Seeded 2026-10-19.