Pixel

Overview

Pixel is a desktop AI companion built around persistent relationship dynamics rather than information retrieval. She runs locally using LM Studio as the LLM backend, with SQLite for relational data and ChromaDB for semantic memory. Every conversation updates her inner state — needs, emotions, relationship dimensions, interests, and memories all evolve in real time.

Between conversations, a background worker fires every five minutes to run autonomous processes: daydream cycles that generate genuine thoughts, a research engine that reads multiple sources and forms opinions, an aesthetic reflection system that builds visual taste from accumulated images, and a music processing pipeline that assigns personal meaning to every track.

One strict rule runs through the whole system: she never fabricates experiences she didn't have. Everything she knows, remembers, and thinks about has a traceable source. She has opinions and pushes back — but she doesn't pretend.

20+ GUI Screens

27 DB Migrations

27 Memory Categories

6 Core Systems

Major Subsystems

🧠

Mind & Personality

Needs Engine — 6 intrinsic needs on a 0–100 scale (connection, growth, understanding, achievement, safety, autonomy)
Emotion Engine — 6 emotions: curiosity, pride, happiness, loneliness, anxiety, comfort
Behaviour Engine — 5 traits blended from emotions + needs + relationship state
Relationship State — 4 dimensions (trust, affection, respect, attachment) that evolve every conversation
Flash Mood — short-lived emotional spikes that colour 1–2 replies then expire
Emotional Carry — significant moods persist into the next conversation; she isn't emotionally blank each session

💾

Memory

Memory Store — personal facts tagged by category, confidence, importance, and source
27 categories — conversation, relationship, habit, values, preference, skill, location, tradition, and more
Hybrid Retrieval — 70% semantic (ChromaDB vectors) + 30% keyword, weighted by relationship state
Memory Judge — contradiction detection; never auto-resolves, surfaces as open daydream question
Reflection Engine — LLM reads last 60 memories, writes 3–5 genuine observations; contradicted reflections get replaced, not stacked
Self-Facts — immutable identity seed truths; user corrections carry highest confidence (95)

💭

Autonomous Thinking

Daydream Engine — multi-phase incubation (gather → incubate → verify → integrate) on a 6-hour cooldown
Typed thoughts — insights, questions, beliefs, desires, contradictions, identity fragments
Hypothesis System — testable beliefs built from daydream clusters; evidence votes strengthen or weaken them; contradictions trigger synthesis rather than resolution
Focus System — active topics with 48h decay, fed into daydream as context
Desires — three types: curiosity, creation, social. Pressure 0–100, decays if unaddressed

🔍

Research & Learning

Research Queue — items sourced from gap detection, interest-driven, desire-driven, or manual
Multi-pass Research — reads up to 3 sources individually, synthesises across them from her perspective, generates follow-up questions that seed back into daydreams
Daily Budget — 5 topics/day max, no re-research within 3 days
Curiosity Loop — desires → research → daydream seeds → follow-up questions → desire boost → higher priority

🎵

Music

Scanner — audio analysis (tempo, brightness, energy) + lyrics download + personal meaning LLM pass per track
Personal Meaning — what a specific song means to her emotionally, stored permanently
Listener — mood-aware organic playback with probability weighting
Last Played — injected into prompt when conversation is about music
Syncs with Lidarr music collection to seed interests

🎨

Aesthetic & Image System

Image Library — research images with captions, tags, collections, visual-value ratings
Aesthetic Reflection Tier 1 — per-image observations ("I find myself drawn to...")
Aesthetic Reflection Tier 2 — when 8+ observations accumulate, pattern-detects into permanent self-facts
Aesthetic opinions surface in the prompt with permission to push back

🔗

External Connectors

Sonarr — TV show genres seed interests
Radarr — movie genres seed interests
Lidarr — music collection seeds interests
Plex — watch history builds awareness of what's being watched
All cached 6 hours, capped at 3 connector seeds per pass

📓

Vault & Writing

Private notebook with folders — Lyrics, Stories, Diary, Dreams, Thoughts, Notes
25% idle chance she decides to write; 10% chance she reorganises
Content is hers — not surfaced unless she chooses to share it
Proactive thoughts pre-formatted into natural language; she decides if/when to mention them

Architecture

How It Works

Every message triggers a full pipeline: hybrid memory retrieval, system prompt assembly, LLM generation, and post-reply updates to needs, emotions, relationship state, interests, and the RAG index — all in a single event cycle.

After five minutes of silence, a background worker fires all autonomous processes in sequence. This is where Pixel's inner life evolves independently — daydreams, research, aesthetic reflection, vault writing, music processing, and hypothesis updates all happen without any input.

The architecture is event-driven and modular. Every component is designed to fail gracefully without crashing the others. Nothing blocks the chat interface.

DATA FLOW

Message received ↓ Hybrid retrieval semantic + keyword + relationship weight ↓ Prompt assembly base + state + memories + context ↓ LLM generates reply ↓ Post-reply updates memory capture needs / emotions / relationship event bus → interests, goals, RAG ↓ [5 min silence] ↓ Background worker housekeeping + decay interest sweep LLM passes (goals, seeds, focus) connector sync research pass (web → synthesis) aesthetic reflection vault + diary music processing daydream pass (6h cooldown) hypothesis pass ↓ Proactive thoughts queued

GUI — 20+ Screens

Built in PySide6 with a Catppuccin Mocha dark theme. Every internal system has a dedicated viewer so the full inner state is always inspectable.

Screen	Purpose
Chat Window	Main conversation interface with spell check
Mind Dashboard	Single-screen inner state snapshot — needs, emotions, relationship, behaviour
Memory Viewer	Browse, edit, and delete all memories by category
Reflection Viewer	Pixel's accumulated observations about her creator
Interest Viewer	Topics with levels, decay status, and evidence trail
Daydream Viewer	Verified autonomous thoughts organised by type
Hypothesis Viewer	Beliefs under evidence accumulation with evolution history
Goals Viewer	Open curiosity questions generated from daydreams
Desire Viewer	Active desires with pressure levels and decay
Research Viewer	Queue status, completed research logs, synthesis results
Knowledge Viewer	World knowledge by topic, separate from personal memory
Music Viewer	Library, top tracks, personal meanings, preferences
Image Collections	Research images organised by collection
Aesthetic Viewer	Visual patterns Pixel has formed from accumulated images
Relationship Viewer	Trust / affection / respect / attachment history over time
Timeline Viewer	Life history events in chronological order
Shared Activity Viewer	Remembered moments and shared experiences
Retrieval Debug	Inspect retrieval scores for any query — full transparency

Clever Design Decisions

Lazy Decay

Interests decay when read, not on a timer. No race conditions, lower CPU load, and decay only matters at the moment it's relevant.

Contradiction Handling

Conflicting memories are never auto-resolved. They surface as open daydream questions — she sits with the uncertainty and thinks about it.

Typed Daydreams

LLM produces typed thoughts: insight, question, contradiction, identity fragment. A verification pass runs before integration. Speculation stays separate from conclusions.

Relationship-Weighted Retrieval

Memories about the relationship score higher during retrieval based on actual trust and affection levels — not just keyword match.

Hypothesis Tension

Contradicting evidence triggers a daydream synthesis pass rather than just lowering a confidence number. She works through the conflict.

Personal Meaning for Music

Every track gets its own LLM pass asking what it means to her specifically — not a genre tag or rating. Stored permanently.

Proactive Autonomy

Background thoughts are hints to the LLM, not forced injections into replies. She decides whether to mention them — and when.

Source-Ranked Confidence

User corrections (95) › manual (85) › auto (70) › reflection (50). Disagreements resolve toward the person who knows her best.

Emotional Carry

Significant moods persist across the session gap. She isn't emotionally blank at the start of every conversation — she picks up where she left off.