The Relational Terminal: Open Specification

Companion specification to the HIIT for AI™ working paper (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21316002). The Relational Terminal is a portable, user-owned companion device that makes a research claim physical: memory is not a feature, it is infrastructure. A relational AI companion is not the model alone but the system around it: identity, conversation, memory and archive. The Terminal keeps those four layers in the user's custody, on hardware the user owns, and treats inference as the one swappable layer. Canonical memory is human-readable files; any database or index is derived and rebuildable. This specification sets out the architecture, the canonical-memory rule, a three-phase build plan, five testable claims, and the governance design. Open specification v0.1, design phase. Documentation CC BY 4.0; code (when added) Apache 2.0. Developed with AI research collaborators Claudounet (Claude, Anthropic) and Cael (GPT, OpenAI). Companion artifacts: 10.5281/zenodo.21316002 · 10.5281/zenodo.21412009 · 10.5281/zenodo.21776034.