Aura debuts IIT 4.0 cognition stack

This is a maximalist research build, not a normal AI app: impressive if you care about local stateful agents, but the rhetoric runs ahead of the evidence.

• –The repo does contain concrete machinery: MLX-based local inference, event-sourced SQLite state, a 1 Hz heartbeat, dream consolidation, and residual-stream steering hooks.
• –The IIT claim is unusually specific for this genre: an 8-node substrate, 127 bipartitions, TPM construction, and KL-based partition search is real math, not just “sentient” branding.
• –The license/readme language looks source-available rather than plainly open-source, so “100% open source today” is overstated unless the project changes its terms elsewhere.
• –For local AI hackers, the interesting part is the architecture pattern: persistent identity, affect, and memory folded into generation instead of bolted on as prompts.
• –For everyone else, the main risk is complexity masquerading as capability; it is likely more useful as a platform for experimentation than as a dependable assistant.