A new Claude Code extension called Intelligence Emotions wants to be your personal mental-fitness coaching team—and it has one non-negotiable rule baked into its architecture: no coach is ever allowed to judge you. Posted to Hacker News on June 12, the project installs via a single git clone and adds twenty commands to your Claude Code workflow, from /intercept (catch a stinging thought in real-time) to /pq-score (get numbers from your actual journal data).

The Core Premise: Catch Your Saboteurs, Not Your Worth

The system is built around the Intelligence Emotions model, which identifies exactly ten saboteurs—destructive mental patterns—and five Sage powers for responding to them. The Judge leads the saboteur list: that inner voice finding fault with everything. When you run /intercept and say 'my coworker got promoted and I feel worthless,' the Spotter coach traces where that word came from, names the pattern (the Hyper-Achiever comparing your worth to external scorekeeping), and calls out the lie—that a colleague's promotion is machinery, not data about you. Then it prescribes a PQ rep: ten seconds of attention on your feet on the floor before your mind gets the microphone.

Five Coaches, One Practice Loop

The team consists of the Sage (flagship session coach for any life challenge), the Spotter (pattern recognition in real-time), the Trainer (morning reps and drills), the Navigator (plans and direction), and the Witness (evening reflection that writes your journal). The daily loop runs /daily-pipeline in the morning, /intercept when a thought stings during the day, and /pq-retro before you close the laptop. Everything is event-sourced and append-only: three JSONL streams under ~/.pq/journal/ (entries.jsonl, saboteurs.jsonl, commitments.jsonl), with supersede-don't-delete semantics and full redaction on demand.

Privacy as Architecture, Not Policy

There is no telemetry—none opt-out, none at all. The project explicitly states every personal piece of data lives in ~/.pq/ with owner-only permissions (0700 directories, 0600 files), never pushed to any remote or sent to any service. A write-time guard refuses credential-shaped secrets from being logged. You can ask any coach to forget something and the record is expunged completely including the archive. The test suite enforces that no external sink can quietly appear.

The 21-Day Arc: From Vague Intention to Honest Review

For challenges that deserve real practice, Intelligence Emotions offers a structured /growth-spec → /habit-watch → /commit arc. Day one turns a vague intention like 'be more patient with my kids' into concrete triggers and daily reps anchored to real moments. Scheduled look-ins catch drift while the fix is still one sentence. Day 21 closes with an honest review: what happened, what it taught, what's next—no grades, just data.

Power Tools for the Data-Minded

The project includes CLI tools for querying your own journal: pq-journal-search --days 7 shows this week's interceptions and entries; pq-journal-search --stats --days 7 gives per-day rep counts, interception rate, and saboteur tallies. The /pq-score command reads real data—not estimates—to tell you your mental-fitness quotient, the percentage of time your mind serves you rather than sabotages you.

Key Takeaways

  • Five specialized AI coaches run entirely locally in Claude Code with zero telemetry
  • Exactly ten saboteurs and five Sage powers—enforced by test suite, no invented eleventh or sixth
  • Daily loop: /daily-pipeline → /intercept → /pq-retro; 21-day arc for deeper practice
  • Journal is event-sourced append-only JSONL under ~/.pq/ with full redaction capability
  • MIT licensed open source on GitHub requiring only Claude Code and Bun v1.0+ to run

The Bottom Line

This is a genuinely interesting intersection of AI tooling and mental fitness practice—built by someone who clearly understands both developer workflows and cognitive behavioral techniques. The local-only, zero-telemetry architecture is the real story here: in an ecosystem where every app wants your data, Intelligence Emotions treats privacy as a design constraint rather than a marketing bullet point. Worth trying if you've ever wished your coding environment could also be a place to practice catching your own BS.