PLwC — Personality Layer with Conscience
PLwC is a governed MCP gateway for Claude Desktop and compatible local MCPclients. It exposes one visible MCP server, routes all capabilities throughpolicy and governance checks, and provides workspace, document, sandbox,profile, reflection and audit-oriented controls.
Status
- Current status: Open Beta, based on
v0.2.0-rc18.dev9. - This repository is the privacy-filtered public Open Beta snapshot. Privatedevelopment history, local evidence, real profiles and workspace data areintentionally not included.
v0.2.0-rc18.dev9combinesPR-005privacy-filtered packaging withRC18-ALIAS-001: reflection marker/trust inputs are English-first whilepreserving PBA2 canonical storage.- Readiness audit result: RC_READY_WITH_NOTES.
- This is not a final public release.
- The latest package-, Desktop- and Odysseus-smoked open beta package is
v0.2.0-rc18.dev9with verdictPASS. - The packaged MCPB is not signed.
PLwC is not production-certified. It is local infrastructure underactive development.
What PLwC does
- Exposes exactly one visible MCP server:
plwc-gateway. - Provides exactly eight public facade tools (see below).
- Controls workspace operations (read / write / search / move / rename/ exact replace / batch read).
- Creates and reads
DOCX,XLSX,PPTXandPDFartifacts. - Inspects, extracts, merges, splits and rotates PDFs.
- Inspects, extracts and creates ZIP archives with bounded safetylimits.
- Reads workspace raster images and returns them as MCP image contentblocks (PNG, JPEG, WEBP, first-frame GIF).
- Runs sandboxed Python and Shell snippets through Docker, with nosilent fallback to a host shell.
- Manages profiles, reflection writes, memory and persona governance,and Governor
plan/applyflows includingreflection_condensationwithplan_idapply. - Blocks protected profile and governance paths from direct workspacewrites.
- Emits structured local audit events for high-risk operations.
Public tools
PLwC v0.2 exposes exactly these eight public facade tools:
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
plwc_status |
Reports gateway, sandbox, and profile runtime state; generates a ready-to-paste Claude Desktop config snippet. |
plwc_describe |
Returns a self-description of all supported tools, operations, plan types, and capability boundaries — the single source of truth for what PLwC can do in the current session. |
plwc_profile |
Loads, inspects, and activates profiles; compiles the configured profile into the active session context. |
plwc_reflection |
Writes governed reflection entries to reflection.md with semantic validation — rejects pure technical logs and requires a reusable user, collaboration, or system insight. |
plwc_governor |
Two-stage plan / apply flow for promoting insights to memory.md or PERSONA.md, condensing stale reflection candidates, and creating new profiles — all requiring explicit confirmation before any write. |
plwc_sandbox_run |
Executes Python or Shell snippets in an isolated Docker container with no network access and no silent fallback to a host shell. |
plwc_workspace_operation |
Reads, writes, lists, searches, copies, moves, and renames files within configured workspace roots; includes binary and base64 paths and an exact-replace mode. Delete is not public. |
plwc_document_operation |
Creates and manipulates DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and PDF files; inspects, merges, splits, rotates, and extracts text from PDFs; handles ZIP archives; reads workspace images as MCP image content blocks. |
The 19 individual public tool names from earlier scaffolds(plwc_compile_profile, plwc_write_workspace_file,plwc_governor_plan, plwc_write_reflection, ...) are no longerpublic in v0.2. Their behavior is reachable through the eight facadetools above via operation / scope / lang dispatch parameters.
Document capabilities
- DOCX Creation V2 (layouts, styles, runs, lists, tables, images,page breaks).
- XLSX Creation V2 (multi-sheet, formatting, formulas-as-written(not executed), freeze panes, boolean
auto_filter, merges). - PPTX Creation V2 (five slide layouts, content elements, tables,images, slide sizes, plain-text speaker notes).
- PDF Creation V2 (layout-PDF builder with A4/A5/landscape/custom pagesizes, headings, paragraph runs, bullet/numbered lists, tables,images, explicit page breaks).
read_image(governed workspace image reads).- ZIP create / inspect / extract.
- PDF inspect / extract / merge / split / rotate / extract_pdf_text.
Security model
- One visible gateway server. No bypass MCP servers are exposed.
- Protected profile and governance files (
PERSONA.md,memory.md,reflection.md,governance/config.yaml, ...) cannot be editedthrough workspace operations. - Workspace operations are scoped to configured roots; parenttraversal, absolute host paths, UNC paths and protected segments arerejected.
- Docker-backed Python and Shell sandbox; no silent host-shellfallback.
- Fail-closed behavior on missing engines, missing Docker image, orpolicy denial.
- No external URL fetching for document assets (PDF V2, PPTX V2 andDOCX V2 image paths must be workspace-relative).
Known limitations
The following are intentionally not implemented in v0.2:
- No OCR.
- No PDF redaction.
- No digital signing.
- No form filling or form creation.
- No PDF/A claim.
- No LibreOffice or Pandoc conversion.
- No macro execution (no
.docm/.xlsm/.pptmgeneration). - No external URL fetching, no network access at runtime.
- No JavaScript in PDFs.
- No HTML/CSS rendering pipeline.
- No final-release claim yet.
Installation
For step-by-step installation, seedocs/QUICKSTART_CLAUDE_DESKTOP.md.
For full installation context, prerequisites and configurationoptions, including local GPT and Odysseus stdio setup plus hosted ChatGPTweb/custom-app status, see docs/INSTALLATION.md.
Documentation
- Program and software description (Dev 9 Open Beta):
docs/PROGRAM_AND_SOFTWARE_DESCRIPTION_OPEN_BETA.md - Install / quickstart:
docs/INSTALLATION.md,docs/QUICKSTART_CLAUDE_DESKTOP.md - Tool reference:
docs/TOOLS.md - Project scope:
docs/PROJECT_SCOPE.md - Security model and protected boundary:
docs/SECURITY_MODEL.md,docs/SAFE_MODE.md - Onboarding / profile setup:
docs/ONBOARDING.md,docs/FIRST_RUN.md - Configuration and troubleshooting:
docs/CONFIGURATION.md,docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md - Open beta / external testing - start here:
BETA_TESTING.md. Details:docs/EXTERNAL_TESTER_GUIDE.md,docs/EXTERNAL_TEST_PLAN.md,docs/BUG_REPORT_TEMPLATE.md,docs/GITHUB_BETA_WORKFLOW.md - Audit behavior:
docs/AUDIT_LOG.md
Support
If PLwC helps you, you can support development via Ko-fi:
Ko-fi support is voluntary and not required to use PLwC.
License
PLwC is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.
