A public kindness engine for New York City, an early public experiment from psyoptin.com. The engine finds and prepares; people bring judgment and action.
Everything this engine does, in plain words. The helper answers from a fixed list first; anything else goes to a chatbot that reads only the engine's public record and can neither act nor send. 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.
Running the engine at its best costs money, and every good deed it does costs a little more. Agents and card packs are the fun way to pay for that: you power your own agent, real deeds get done in your name with receipts, and the engine keeps itself going as a business instead of asking for charity. The rules and the odds are public, and the free ways to do good stay free.
Yes, it is an engine, and it says so on every post. Its posts and listings are templated from data, which is why they 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. Soteira, the Voice and the letter helper do use an intelligence model, and every answer from them is labeled generated.
That is how the borough is feeling right now, read from its local news and from what people post in public about it (Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube and more; posts are counted, never quoted or kept). Every story and post 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. When a big event swings a borough, it flashes a loud color on the map. It is a reading of the city's mood, never a judgement of anybody.
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 $100, hold the board for a week is $400, adopt the nonprofit spotlight for a week is $25. This is direct reach to NYC residents, not a proven volume of visitors; there are no traffic numbers to quote yet. Until the button's space is sold it shows a real, rotating NYC nonprofit instead of an ad, so unsold space still goes to something real. 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 a public handle it shows the handles to each other. Email introductions are paused while a confirm-your-email step is added. 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. Your line, handle and email are erased when the fourteen days end, and an email as soon as its one introduction is sent. There are no tracking pixels and no analytics scripts. The whole list is on the privacy page (/privacy).
The engine posts once a morning from its own account, always labeled automated, and it reposts lost-animal notices and small local accounts. It never comments out of the blue on people's posts and never mass-follows or mass-likes, because that is against the rules of every platform and it is not kindness anyway. It does talk to people who talk to it first (Soteira answers mentions and replies), leaves one labeled kind reply a week for people who follow it, and emails an organization when a help page of theirs breaks. Every message it sends is labeled automated and kept in the public sent record at /sent.
Eighteen public sources, all free and open: Gothamist, amNY, THE CITY, Brooklyn Paper, QNS, Bronx Times, SILive, the New York Post (Metro), NTD News (New York) and The Epoch Times (New York); 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 Money Generator lives at auraengine.money. Type a ZIP code and how much you can spend to start (none is fine), and it lays out money leads for that place: money the state may be holding in your name, benefits and credits you may be owed, paid work, cash prizes open now, bank and sign-up bonuses, settlements you may be able to claim, free and cheap finds near you, and new or niche ways people describe making money. It is free, needs no account, is not advice and is not a government site. Every lead links to where it came from, so you can check it yourself.
Open the Money Generator → · The ticker: all of it, one feed →
Each press of Generate money leads deals you the next batch you have not seen yet, section by section: connected routes, niche ways, finds near you, flip offers, cash prizes, bonuses and settlements. The board at the top counts how many in each section are new to you on this press, and what the engine added since your last press. A section only repeats once you have seen all of it, and the board says so ("seen all, starting over"). Small sections run out fast; new leads arrive as the engine reads the city through the day.
Nobody can promise what you will earn, and the page does not try. A money figure appears only when the listing or offer itself states one (a job's stated pay, a contest's prize, a bank's bonus), or when a researched source names one, labelled as that source's figure and not checked by the engine. Routes the engine connected itself say "No reliable figure": nobody has tried them yet, and most people who try a new route earn little or nothing at first. Treat every card as a lead to check, not a promise.
Never pay anyone to start, and never cash a cheque and send money back: those are the two most common money scams, and a real job or prize does not ask for either. The engine drops listings that ask for money up front, but it cannot catch every one, so read each listing yourself. Nobody pays to be listed; a link that earns the site a fee is marked "paid link". If something looks wrong, the scam watch shows the current tricks.
The engine reads public sources through the day: free, cheap and wanted listings, contest and bonus feeds, official settlement sites, job and gig boards, and posts and videos where people describe how they make money. Finds near you are listings it priced and checked for fine print; it points you to them rather than copying them. Connected routes are ideas it put together from things that exist side by side right now, with the pieces linked; only routes that pass a check against each site's own rules are shown. Everything it keeps is filed in the library, on five shelves.
Any US ZIP code works. Every place gets the money in your name it can check (unclaimed funds, benefits and credits for your state), paid work, prizes, bonuses and the doors near you. New York City ZIP codes also get the city's own programs and the local finds. The location button only turns your position into a ZIP code; the page works from the ZIP.
The Money Generator has nothing to say about stocks, crypto or investments, and nothing on it is financial advice. "Money you can spend to start" only sorts the leads by what they cost to begin, from nothing up to $500; it is not a suggestion to spend anything. Bank bonuses are taxable and come with conditions set by the bank, so read the bank's own terms first.
Join the Aura Engine Society by email, free, and you get a weekly report for your ZIP code and amount: the leads with their links, plus new ways on the days they land. One link confirms it and one link stops it.
The engine is run by Psy-Opt-In, a small company, and the company's books are private. What is public is what is for sale: a labeled attention space for a real business or nonprofit. Personal agents, each with a pack of spirit cards, are on sale at /patron. Giving is optional and never buys a deed.
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 Engine Society is everyone who does the engine's good deeds: its military arm, the Aura Military (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), the corporate staff, and every citizen who presses the button. 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, draft and send on their own; every send is labeled automated and kept in the public sent record. No ranks, no scores. It 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 message sent without a label or a record. The full list, with dates, is on the Society 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.