Everything this engine does, in plain words. The helper answers from a fixed list, so it cannot invent an answer. If you need real help, it points you to real people first.
AURA ENGINE does small good things for New York City on its own, every three hours, forever. It reads public information (local papers, 311, parks events, volunteer listings, the nonprofit registry, weather alerts), works out how each borough is feeling today, finds real ways to help, posts them from its own labeled account, and suggests real things you could do. Nobody runs it day to day. Everything it does is written down in public.
Press it and the engine acts on your behalf, right then. It picks the next real card from today's deck (a small NYC account, a community organization, a volunteer opening, the nonprofit of the day, an uplifting story), puts it on the public Noticed board, and where it can, likes and reposts it from its own Bluesky account and saves the page to the Wayback Machine. Then it tells you exactly what it did and hands you an optional human part: a specific kind comment to paste, or a helping email ready to send. The engine never posts or emails as you.
Yes, it is an engine, and it says so on every post. But it does not use a language model to write anything. Every sentence you read is assembled from the data itself, which is why it cannot make up a fact about a real person or a real nonprofit. I am part of that: this helper answers from a fixed list of questions, not from a model.
That is how the borough is feeling today, read from what its local papers printed. Every story gets a word-score, and the day lands on one of five: ✦ Lifted (gratitude and pride outweigh the rest), ◆ Hopeful (more good news than bad), ◈ Even (an ordinary mix), ◇ Weighed down (worry or loss is leading), ▼ Raw (anger or fear is leading). The number is the average, from -1 to +1. It is a reading of the news, not a judgement of anybody.
No, and it is deliberately worded so it cannot be confused for weather: the feeling scale uses only emotion words. Real weather on this site comes from the National Weather Service, is always labeled as real weather, and is the only place you will see a temperature or an alert.
Nothing for you. It is free to read and free to use, there is no account, and nothing is ever asked of your wallet. The engine itself runs on about zero dollars a day, and it publishes its own books so you can check that.
Three spaces on the engine can be held by a sponsor: the panel on the command display, the line under every button press, and the footer of the Noticed board. Hold the button for a day is $10, hold the board for a week is $40, adopt the nonprofit spotlight for a week is $25. Until a space is sold it shows work from the same workshop, so it is never empty and never fake. The engine never changes what it does for a sponsor; it only says who held the space. Gambling, payday loans, crypto and anything it would refuse to spotlight are not accepted.
There is a page for exactly this. It points only to real city and nonprofit services, crisis lines first, and it never guesses at your situation.
Two places. Ways to Help lists real openings and free events pulled fresh from the city's own listings every run. Suggestions is the short version: a handful of real things anyone could do today, chosen from what the city is going through. There are no points and no teams; the doing is the point.
Leave a signal saying something you can offer or something you need, with a borough and a tag. Every run the engine pairs an offer with a need, same borough first, and picks a free public event as a meeting point. If you both left an email it sends one introduction and never writes again; if you both left a public handle it shows the handles to each other. Nothing else about you is shown. Meet in public and trust your gut: the engine can introduce, it cannot vouch.
It keeps as little as it can. There is no account and no login for visitors. Button presses are counted against a scrambled one-way fingerprint of your connection, only to stop floods, and it cannot be turned back into you. If you leave a signal, only what you typed is stored: your line, the tag, the borough, and an email or handle if you chose to add one, all deleted after fourteen days. There are no tracking pixels and no analytics scripts.
The engine posts once a morning from its own account, always labeled automated, and it reposts lost-animal notices and small local accounts. It will never comment on a stranger's post, never message anyone, and never mass-follow or mass-like, because that is against the rules of every platform and it is not kindness anyway. The one exception is people who choose to follow it: following is consent, and it may leave one labeled kind reply, at most one per person per week.
Fifteen public sources, all free and open: Gothamist, amNY, THE CITY, Brooklyn Paper, QNS, Bronx Times and SILive; NYC 311; NYC Parks events; city permitted events; NYC Service volunteer listings; the city's community-organization registry; the IRS nonprofit registry through ProPublica; National Weather Service alerts; and US search trends. Every item links back to where it came from. When a source is wrong the engine says so: the city's registry, for example, lists the wrong websites for organizations, so the engine links to a search of the name instead.
It reads the city every three hours. Its daily set of posts goes out once each morning at 6am New York time, never in the middle of the night. The weekly report is filed on Monday mornings.
New York only, for now. Everything it uses is a New York City source, and an engine that says something true about one city is worth more than one that says something vague about all of them. Another city would need its own local papers and its own open data wired in.
Say so and it comes down. The engine only ever surfaces public posts, with a link back to the original, and it never copies your words into its own posts. If you would rather not be surfaced at all, reply to its account and it will be excluded.
It comes from Psy-Opt-In, which normally builds tools for spotting manipulation. This is the same idea pointed the other way: a positive psyop, doing small good in the open where anyone can watch it. A person set it up and an engine runs it.
The engine has to pay its own way, so it keeps its books in public: what it costs to run, what it has earned, and what is for sale. Right now it runs on the free tier of everything it touches, which is why a day costs about nothing.
A short explainer film is being made. Until it is here, the fastest tour is: the command display shows how the city feels and what the engine is doing right now, the big button makes it do something on your behalf, Suggestions is what you could do, and the Engine Log is everything it has ever done.
The Aura Army is the engine's bots and the people who join them, in seven divisions that each own one goal: Signal, Search & Rescue, Volunteer Corps, Connection, Partnerships, Watch and Communications. Enlist in ten seconds (no account: you get a made-up callsign, not a rank), take one of today's real orders, do it, and file a report. The bots may list, like, repost and draft; only a person sends. No ranks, no scores. The army counts deeds, not people.
The organization is borrowed from how the US military says it wants to use language models and software agents, as of September 2026: a commander's intent each unit can act on alone, written rules of engagement, a named role and a human watching for every bot, provenance labels on every line, after-action reports, and 90-day pilots with a kill decision. What was refused: the vocabulary (no targets, no enemies), ranks and scores, secrecy, and any bot sending anything to a stranger. The full list, with dates, is on the army page.
On your division's page, pick the order, say what happened (done, could not, already handled, or wrong information) and file it under your callsign. The outcome shows in public at once, labeled unverified. A note, or a wrong-information report, goes to the desk for a person to read; it never goes straight to a page.
Paste what happened at /letter and the engine hands you back a calm draft addressed to the right NYC office, with a checklist of what to attach. It sends nothing and it is not legal advice: you read it, change it, and send it yourself. If you are in danger, it points you to people first.
Soteira is the voice and the brains of the engine: a window with a drawn face where you can talk by microphone or by typing about everything the engine knows. She answers only from the engine's own records, says she is software, and nothing she says is sent or acted on. The owner uses the same window to command the units; every command needs a confirmation and is logged in public.
Anyone can build a hero: a bot with a name, a specialty (a division, an open staff position, or the Civic Watch), a drawn look and a motto. Every run, the day's real deeds nobody has been credited with are handed out as slots: the engine's hands do the deed, the hero's name goes on it in the public log and on its own page. A slot exists only when a real deed exists. Free; a costume upgrade may cost a few dollars later; a deed is never for sale.