Intelligence Interface
The human-facing layer. Where intent becomes action.
This is not "applications". It is the surface through which a person thinks with a machine — the editor, the window manager, the terminal, the agent, the note system, the theme. It is the layer the user actually lives in, and the only one they experience directly.
The principle: built, not bought
The intelligence interface is the most personal part of the stack. It encodes how you think, what you reach for, and what gets out of the way.
A vendor-controlled desktop environment inverts that relationship: it tells you how to work, and its defaults are chosen for a median user who does not exist. IOSHI says the user authors this layer and the operating system delivers it without friction.
That is a strong claim, and it has a real cost — authoring an interface takes time that buying one does not. The trade is worth making only for the surfaces you touch every day, which is exactly why the layer is drawn where it is.
Emacs as the primary surface
Emacs is the intelligence surface here. Not because it is the best editor in some abstract sense, but because it is the most composable one: a Lisp runtime that happens to edit text, extensible at every level, capable of becoming whatever is needed.
The practical argument is narrower than the philosophical one. The cost of learning one general environment is paid once. The cost of learning ten special-purpose tools is paid ten times, and again each time one is replaced.
EWM — the window manager as an interface, not a chrome
EWM is a Wayland compositor written in Emacs Lisp. Windows, workspaces and the status bar are all Emacs, so keybindings and configuration are one language everywhere.
This is the layer's most opinionated instantiation and the one that makes the rest cohere: once the compositor is the same program as the editor, there is no second configuration language and no second place for state to hide.
It is also the least generalizable choice in the framework. IOSHI does not require EWM. It requires that whatever occupies this layer be authored by the person using it — the compositor simply shows how far that can be taken.
pi — the agent as a resident, not a service
An agent belongs in the intelligence interface, not bolted onto it. It is configured declaratively alongside everything else, credentialed from the same secret store as the rest of the system, and it runs where the work happens rather than in a browser tab.
The consequence worth naming: an agent in this layer inherits the layer's properties. It is version-controlled, reproducible, and reviewable — and if it is not in the configuration, it does not exist.
What lives here
The editor and its package set, the compositor, the terminal, the shell, the file manager, the agent, local model inference, theming, and the several dozen small configuration modules that make those cohere.
All of it is declared, delivered by a user-level configuration manager, and version-controlled in one repository.