The condition is confidently true and this is its rising edge — the moment it became true. One delivered incident, not one per frame: a kettle that boils for three minutes is one event, not 720 notifications.
The perception runtime
Program whatdeserves attention.
LiveStream + Watch (Goal + Policy) -> stream<PerceptEvent>
Percept is the Apache-2.0 perception runtime for standing watches over continuous streams. State a condition in plain language; the runtime samples, judges, and gates it into one useful interruption — a durable incident with evidence and a trace.
01 · The gate
Known → act. Not → silent. Unknown → ask.
Every decision maps to exactly one of three states. The system never guesses — an unknown is never rounded up to a fire or rounded down to silence. One firing path, one gate: every fire type reaches you through the same single authority.
The system cannot tell. Instead of guessing, it requests confirmation. Asks are refusals to guess, and they are counted — refused is a first-class funnel stage, never hidden.
The condition is not true, or it already fired for this edge. Suppressed — and the suppression itself is observable, never a dropped-on-the-floor mystery.
02 · The subsystems
Fourteen modules, one firing path.
From the frozen contracts at the bottom to the edge harness at the top, every subsystem feeds the same pipeline: sample → route/cache → judge → gate → deliver. Each cell links to the module distillation.
01Contracts
A frozen vocabulary every layer speaks, versioned like an API.
02Core-and-AgentSample → route/cache → judge → gate → deliver, with one gate.
03WatchPlan-and-GoalsPlain language, carried verbatim — never compiled to predicates.
04JudgesAuthorize, bind, dispatch — fail-closed at every step.
05BackendsProviders are identity, models are configuration.
06RuntimeA 24/7 watch loop in one line, with safe delivery built in.
07RoutingDefer-on-miss is structural: when in doubt, the model decides.
08CacheNever pay a model twice for the same unchanged scene.
09Sensing-and-SignalsIdentity is established below the LLM.
10Episodes-and-EvidenceEpisodes remember what stayed true; evidence fails loudly.
11Profiles-and-ConfigurationEvery threshold answers: where did this value come from?
12Observability-and-DiagnosticsOne funnel, counted once — no number is ever invented.
13EvaluationSilence is never a pass: bars are declared before numbers exist.
14HarnessA cheap gate in front of an expensive eye.
03 · Go deeper
Run it, read it, or try it hosted.
The runtime is open source under Apache-2.0. The same boundary powers the managed path: Percept Cloud owns projects, uploads, and operations around the open engine.
Install locally.
pip install percept-vision, then the watch() one-liner — offline, with deterministic fakes and no API keys.
Understand the seams.
Canonical guides for the OSS runtime, Cloud, APIs, and integrations.
Run a guided sample.
Use the hosted Playground for projects, uploads, and inspectable results.
Release notes, compatibility, and checksums are intentionally marked Preview until the public site is connected to a clean, immutable OSS release manifest. See release status.