Yente

Inbound-first professional introductions by email.

Email yente@ccme.network. Yente gathers enough professional evidence to understand who you are, interviews for what is missing, and only then considers an introduction.

Yente turns resume-shaped evidence into careful B2B introductions:

1. A person emails Yente.
2. Yente asks for a resume or equivalent professional information.
3. An LLM extracts evidenced facts and conducts the interview.
4. Deterministic policy qualifies people and scores potential matches.
5. Each party privately receives their own preview letter carrying the other side's evidenced profile card, and may approve, pass, correct the record, stop, or request deletion.
6. Yente sends one joint CCME introduction and steps out — only after BOTH parties say yes. Approvals may be a control word or plain English (the LLM reads the reply; its verdict must quote the words that carry it, and an unclear reply moves nothing). The desk's fully-automated flow additionally honours a veto window before its introduction goes out.

Yente does not cold-email strangers, schedule meetings, create calendar events, or join calls. The introduced people choose whether and how to meet; the final email simply asks them to reply-all and share a calendar link or a few times.

Design boundary

The LLM may read evidence, extract candidate facts, choose interview questions, and write natural email prose. It may not decide qualification, compute match scores, advance workflow state, override consent, or send mail.

Those decisions live in deterministic code and produce inspectable reason codes. Outbound mail is permitted only as a direct consequence of an inbound relationship or an already-authorized match workflow.

Sentinel Blocks from genesis

sentinel-blocks is the protocol for every untrusted boundary: prompt inputs, model outputs, extracted profile facts, match explanations, and generated email artifacts. The protocol uses a closed block-tag registry and rejects unknown, missing, or duplicate contract blocks before content can reach workflow logic.

Inside the deterministic core, data remains typed JavaScript objects so policy cannot be hidden in prose.

Current status

Running desk. Phase 1a shipped the deterministic genesis core — the v2 contract in SPEC_v2.md, Sentinel Block protocol helpers, evidenced qualification, deterministic match scoring with hard gates, the private-preview / veto-window / joint-introduction state machine, and the executable tests that pin all of it. Everything the genesis README said was "not yet" built has since been built, and it runs in production as one process (node bin/yente.mjs):

• Mailbox adapter — a single IMAP read path (imapflow, durable UID cursor, UIDVALIDITY handling) feeds an append-only, content-addressed evidence ledger; the desk consumes the ledger rather than racing for the inbox. Attachments are parsed in-process (PDF via unpdf, DOCX via mammoth).
• LLM adapter, two seats — YENTE_MODEL_DOCUMENT reads evidence (extraction, observation, span-verified grounding), YENTE_MODEL_MESSAGE is the voice: it composes conversational replies and writes the joint introduction itself. Every generated email passes a disclosure guard (closed template set, no un-authorised addresses, no raw source quotes). There is no canned fallback: a letter the model cannot compose is not sent — the reply goes on a durable owed ledger and the voice retries it every tick until a real, guard-passing letter pays the debt. Local models over an OpenAI-style endpoint are first-class; see docs/PROVIDERS.md.
• Understanding pipeline — models answer in Sentinel observation envelopes, one JSON claim per line, each claim span-verified against the source before it can enter the graph. Partly-verified answers get a graded RESULTS round (accepted claims banked, rejections returned with parser reason codes) instead of a blind retry.
• Supervisor lanes — the main thread owns the stores and dispatches model work to worker-thread pools, sized per seat with YENTE_INGEST_WORKERS / YENTE_VOICE_WORKERS (0 keeps a seat in-process). A crashed lane costs one attempt of one task, never data.
• Durable outbox — every outbound letter is queued with an idempotency key and drained separately, so a crash between deciding and sending leaves a durable job, and reboots settle any owed replies exactly once.
• Matching, always on — the connect loop scores the graph continuously (intent × complementary intent, and graded candidates answering live hiring/investing asks), auto-qualifies members the graph can stand behind (YENTE_AUTOQUALIFY=0 restores the operator-driven lifecycle), and queues introduction candidates for human review. Operator confirmation opens a consent round: each party is mailed the other's evidenced profile card and the joint introduction sends only when both reply yes — approvals quoted verbatim on the match record, one decline ends it, and no one carries more than five live introductions at a time (YENTE_PARTY_APPROVAL=0 restores operator-only instant sends).
• Operator manager — a private web console with the full dossier per person (every claim with its quote and source, proposal grades, lifecycle controls, match review), plus a status tape that reports the standing match tally, per-tick extraction outcomes, and send failures.
• Public résumé directory — an identity-resolved, searchable directory of evidenced profiles at /directory on the landing page, built from pure store reads. No email addresses are ever rendered.

The earlier founder/investor design remains in SPEC.md as historical context; v2 is the active contract. Operational references live in docs/: collections, polling, providers, and the state machine.

Public Founding Network

Yente includes a VPS-ready public landing page and waitlist slice:

• free founding membership for 5,000 founders/developers and 5,000 investors/employers;
• a consented subscriber form persisted in an embedded, filesystem-backed NEDB v2 DAG;
• live public capacity counters polled every 10 seconds;
• idempotent subscription updates keyed by normalized email;
• a .env-protected subscriber desk at /admin/; and
• spreadsheet-safe CSV export.

The waitlist is an inbound request, not automatic qualification. A subscriber still needs professional evidence, interview completion, deterministic qualification, and activation before entering the match engine.

Configure from .env.example, then run:

set -a
source .env
set +a
npm start

YENTE_WAITLIST_DATA_PATH names the waitlist's dedicated embedded NEDB directory. It must not reuse Yente's core database path.

See docs/VPS_DEPLOY.md for systemd, nginx, TLS, storage, and operations.

Run the core

Requires Node.js 24 or newer.

npm install
npm test

Run Yente

One process, everything she is — desk, listener, understanding, matching, and the web surfaces on one port (the operator manager on its own):

set -a; source .env; set +a
node bin/yente.mjs

The halves still run alone when you want them to: bin/daemon.mjs (desk only), bin/graph.mjs (listener/graph only), plus bin/inspect.mjs, bin/extract-once.mjs, and bin/observe-once.mjs for reading and replaying without a running desk. Key environment:

YENTE_MODEL_DOCUMENT=…    # the model that reads evidence
YENTE_MODEL_MESSAGE=…     # the model that writes to people (defaults to document)
YENTE_INGEST_WORKERS=2    # document-seat worker lanes (0 = in-process)
YENTE_VOICE_WORKERS=1     # voice-seat worker lanes (0 = in-process)
YENTE_AUTOQUALIFY=1       # graph-driven qualification (0 = operator-driven)

See .env.example for the full set.

Licence

Code is BUSL-1.1 with a Change Date of 2030-08-09, converting to Apache-2.0. Third-party packages and model weights retain their upstream licences.

Built by Interchained LLC.