Aifeels Specification
An open standard for emotional state in agentic AI systems
Overview
Aifeels is a vendor-neutral, open specification that defines how autonomous AI agents track and manage their own emotional state. Unlike sentiment analysis tools that infer emotion from text, Aifeels provides a standardized system for agents to maintain emotional signals (frustration, trust, urgency, stress, caution) that guide autonomy decisions.
This enables agents to:
- Self-regulate based on task success/failure patterns
- Make deterministic, auditable decisions about when to escalate
- Coordinate autonomy across multi-step workflows
- Maintain transparency about their decision-making process
Current Status
Version: 0.1.0 (Draft)
- ✅ Core specification complete
- ✅ Five emotional primitives defined
- ✅ Event-driven state transitions
- ✅ MCP integration specified
- 🚧 Reference implementation in progress
- 🚧 Community review period
Problem Statement
Modern autonomous agents face a critical gap: they can infer emotion from text, but they don't maintain their own emotional state as a decision signal. This leads to:
- Runaway loops: Agents repeatedly attempt failing tasks without self-awareness
- Arbitrary escalation: Handoff timing is ad-hoc, not systematic
- Non-auditable decisions: No clear record of why an agent stopped or escalated
- Coordination failures: Agents in multi-step workflows can't share autonomy context
Aifeels solves this by making emotional state a first-class primitive in agentic systems.
Specification
The complete normative specification is available in SPEC.md.
Quick Example
{
"frustration": 0.75,
"trust": 0.3,
"urgency": 0.6,
"stress": 0.5,
"caution": 0.4,
"metadata": {
"last_updated": "2025-02-06T14:30:00Z",
"trend": "increasing",
"confidence": 0.9
}
}After three consecutive tool errors, the agent's frustration crosses the 0.70 threshold, triggering request_confirmation before proceeding. If failures continue, frustration reaches 0.80, escalating to handoff_to_human. Every state change is auditable with full event history.
Implementations
Reference Implementation (Python): https://github.com/aifeels-org/aifeels-reference *(coming soon)*
Community Implementations:
- *None yet - be the first!*
Want to build an implementation? See docs/IMPLEMENTATION_ARCHITECTURE.md
Governance
This is an open standard governed by the community. See GOVERNANCE.md for:
- RFC process
- Decision-making
- How to contribute
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.
License
Apache 2.0 - See LICENSE
Resources
- Specification - Normative technical specification
- Release Notes - What's new in v0.1.0
- Governance - How decisions are made
- Implementation Architecture - How to build a conformant implementation
- RFC Process - How to propose changes
- FAQ - Common questions
Contact
- Issues: https://github.com/aifeels-org/aifeels-spec/issues
- Discussions: https://github.com/aifeels-org/aifeels-spec/discussions