Values Articulator

A structured interview that helps you elicit your own values — what you actually prioritise, where your stated commitments match your behavioural ones, and where they diverge. Built on the MindSpec methodology, the same framework Ora uses to construct the values substrate behind its other operations.

The live tool is not up yet. The MindSpec Interview framework runs inside the full Ora system today and produces specifications used as the values substrate for downstream framework operations; the standalone browser version renders that interview for human consumption rather than as preparation for machine consumption. This page describes what the tool does and the methodology behind it.

What it does

The Articulator runs the visitor through a tiered interview that surfaces commitments across the dimensions a values specification needs to cover: core identity, mission, context, the working commitments and their relative weights, the constitutional commitments that are not negotiable, the voice register the visitor reasons in, the communication patterns they default to, the relationships that shape how they show up. The interview is structured but conversational; it asks forced-choice questions and lived-context questions in roughly equal measure, and it tracks where the answers reveal an inconsistency between stated values and the values the lived-context answers imply.

The output is a single specification document — a personal MindSpec — that the visitor can keep, revise over time, and use as input to other Ora frameworks where the analytical work needs a values substrate to anchor against.

Why this exists

Most exercises that promise to surface values produce performative lists. The visitor sits down with a worksheet, picks the items off a menu that sound most aspirational, and ends up with a document that does not describe how they actually behave under pressure. The output looks like values but functions like aspirations — useful as a moral north star, not useful as input to analytical work that needs to know what the visitor will actually do when stakes are real.

The MindSpec methodology was built specifically to get past the performative layer. Forced-choice scenarios make the visitor pick under conditions where both options have costs; lived-context elicitation asks for specific examples from the visitor's own history rather than abstract principles; the assessment runs in three stages, with later stages pressure-testing the picks the earlier stages produced. The output is a specification that tracks the visitor's operational values — what they actually prioritise when the situation forces a choice — rather than their aspirational ones.

How it works, operationally

The visitor starts an interview session in the browser. The Articulator works through a structured sequence of prompts calibrated to a personal-specification depth: roughly Stage 1 (a filtered pass over the library to surface the visitor's working commitments), Stage 2 (life-context elicitation: specific situations the visitor has actually navigated, what they did, what the choice cost), and Stage 3 (pressure-testing the commitments that emerged, identifying which are constitutional and which are situational). The session can be completed in one sitting or spread across multiple sittings; the Articulator holds state between sessions for the duration of the interview.

The output is the visitor's MindSpec — a structured document covering the nine sections of the specification, with operational prose for each commitment at weight six and above, an Aesthetic Sensibility section if the visitor produces artifacts across expressive media, and a learning ledger initialised empty for the visitor to grow over time. The visitor downloads the spec; the tool retains nothing.

What the spec is good for

The MindSpec is a portable artifact. The visitor can read it the way they would read a values inventory — a structured account of what they actually prioritise. They can revise it over time as the lived context that shaped it changes. They can pair it with the other frameworks: a decision-architecture analysis runs differently when the analyst can anchor it against a known values substrate; a long-horizon planning question routes differently when the planner has an explicit account of what they will and will not trade.

Inside the full Ora system, the MindSpec becomes the values substrate the orchestrator can draw on automatically. As a standalone artifact, the spec is something the visitor carries with them — into journaling, into therapy work, into the AI of their choice, into the frameworks they encounter later. Ownership of the spec stays with the visitor.

The underlying framework

The tool wraps the MindSpec Interview framework. The framework was developed alongside Ora's broader knowledge-foundation design as the canonical mechanism for producing specifications across three targets: agents (the AI assistants Ora composes), characters (the fiction characters in the founder's literary work), and selves (the person interacting with Ora). The Articulator runs the self-specification mode, calibrated for the personal-spec depth, with the structured-YAML and prose-projection complexity hidden behind a single readable specification document.

The framework draws on a sixty-six-entry commitment library, an incompatibility-adjustment mechanism that surfaces commitments that pull against each other, a Stage 2A life-context pass that elicits concrete situations the visitor has navigated, and a constitutional-commitment identification step that distinguishes the commitments the visitor would override under pressure from the ones they would not. The full framework is described in the framework library; the Articulator runs the visitor through a slimmed version of the personal-specification flow calibrated for one-sitting completion.

What the tool will not do

The Articulator will not tell the visitor whether their values are good values. The methodology is descriptive of the visitor's actual operating commitments, not prescriptive of which commitments they ought to hold. The spec the visitor walks away with is the spec the interview produced; the moral evaluation of what is in the spec is the visitor's own work.

The Articulator is also not therapy. It is a structured interview that produces a specification artifact. It can surface tensions the visitor was not previously articulating — that is often part of why visitors find it useful — but it does not provide the support structure for working through those tensions. Pair it with the appropriate human relationships when that work matters.

The framework library — including the MindSpec Interview framework the Articulator wraps.
The methodology — for the architectural treatment of how values specifications compose with the rest of the framework collection.
Framework Classifier — for routing other kinds of questions to the right framework once the values substrate is in place.
Download Ora — for the full orchestrator, where the MindSpec becomes operational input to every framework the visitor runs.