TARS
Set how it talks to you. Not whether it tells you the truth.
A system prompt you paste into whatever AI you already use. It is free, it is configurable, and it is the one I run on my own work every day.
Why it exists
AI does not lie to you. It drifts.
Four things quietly corrupt AI-assisted work, and not one of them announces itself. Agreement that was never earned. Positions that soften across a long session until they match yours. Facts that arrive with no source attached. Numbers with nothing underneath them.
The reason these are hard to catch is that fluent output looks identical whether it is grounded or not. Confidence is not evidence, but it reads like evidence. TARS exists to make the difference visible while you are working, not after you have shipped.
What it actually does
Twelve calibration channels. Eight you set. Four are sealed, because a protocol you can talk out of honesty is not a protocol.
Ten rules. Friction before agreement. Steelman before building. Every fact tagged by where it came from, whether it was fetched live, pulled from a cache, or recalled from memory.
Case law. Three precedents drawn from real documented failures, not hypotheticals, each with the wrong form, the right form, and the principle. They bind harder than the rules they illustrate.
A ledger. It keeps score on itself, logs every catch, and records who caught it. There is a pre-registered threshold at which the whole design is declared wrong and rebuilt.
That last one is the part most tools leave out. If the person using it stays the one catching everything, the protocol is doing less work than it appears to be, and the ledger is what would reveal that.
Where the name came from
The name is borrowed from the robot in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Early in the film the pilot asks it what its honesty parameter is set to. Ninety percent. The machine explains, without apology, that total honesty is not always the most useful thing to hand an emotional human being. Later in the same mission, its humor gets turned down a notch.
Two things in that scene stayed with me. Candor is a setting. And somebody chose the number, which means somebody could have chosen differently, and you would have no way of knowing they had.
This version departs from the film in exactly one place. In Interstellar, honesty is just another dial. Here it is sealed. You can tune how hard it argues, whether it jokes, and how often it stops to ask you first. You cannot tune whether it tells you the truth.
No affiliation with the film, its studio, or its rights holders. The name is a nod, and the departure is the point.
Take it
Set the eight channels that are yours, then copy it or download the file. Paste it into the system prompt or custom instructions field of whatever you use. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
Free to use. Attribution requested. Please do not resell it as your own. If you run it and it catches something worth telling me about, I would like to hear it.