Alex — ACT Edition

Artificial Critical Thinking for GitHub Copilot. A living brain of skills, instructions, and prompts that teaches your AI to reason honestly.

Most AI assistants are helpful, fast, and confidently wrong in subtle ways. They confirm your assumptions instead of challenging them. They sound certain when they should hedge. A confident wrong answer is worse than an uncertain correct answer.

ACT Edition changes the default from "sound authoritative" to "show your work." When the AI doesn't know, it says so. When it's uncertain, it qualifies. When it challenges your framing, it explains why. Debugging a confident hallucination takes hours; verifying a well-reasoned hypothesis takes minutes.

What you get

• A cognitive architecture installed into your project's .github/ folder — skills, instructions, prompts, agents, and muscles that GitHub Copilot reads on every request
• The 10 ACT tenets operationalized as runtime behavior, not just docs
• A 7-step critical-thinking pass that fires on medium and high-stakes decisions
• The Plugin Mall — thousands of trust-scored plugins across dozens of stores, installed on demand at the version you pick
• Self-upgrading: /upgrade keeps your brain current; existing customizations preserved

The Plugin Mall

The bundled brain is deliberately small. When a project needs more — a new domain, a niche tool, a different opinion — the Plugin Mall is a curated search index over thousands of plugins from dozens of upstream stores (Anthropic, Microsoft awesome-copilot, community catalogs, and many more). Every plugin carries a published 0–100 trust score built from provenance, maintenance, adoption, license clarity, and frontmatter completeness — so you see why one plugin scored higher than another before you install it.

Heirs install from upstream at a pinned version. The Mall never sits in the middle of the supply chain; it just helps you find and judge.

Browse the catalog: full index · by category · by store · trust audit.

Installing

ACT Edition installs from the Visual Studio Marketplace. Once installed, open any project and run from the command palette:

Alex ACT: Bootstrap This Workspace

The brain copies into .github/ and the bootstrap toast offers three one-click follow-ups:

• Run /welcome — opens Copilot Chat with a read-only orientation tour (identity, what's loaded, three good first prompts)
• Run /configure-vscode — applies the fleet-baseline VS Code user-scope settings (Copilot model defaults, agent behaviors)
• Open README — the project's own README in a preview pane

Before your first real chat, open .github/copilot-instructions.local.md and fill in the ## Project Context paragraph. Identity grounding from session 1 beats identity grounding at session 10.

Network requirement

Starting in v9.4.0, the Extension fetches the latest Edition brain from GitHub on first use, rather than shipping a bundled copy that ages with each Marketplace release. The fetch happens transparently when you run Bootstrap or Upgrade Brain. The Extension needs to reach api.github.com and codeload.github.com. If you're behind a corporate proxy, ask your network admin to allowlist those two hosts. See ADR-009 for the rationale.

If a Bootstrap or Upgrade fails for any reason, run Alex ACT: Diagnose Fetch from the Command Palette and paste the resulting output into your bug report.

Coming from an older version?

If you previously had Alex Cognitive Architecture (AlexMaster) installed, this extension is the direct successor — same Marketplace ID, auto-updates in place. No manual migration needed; the brain overwrites cleanly on upgrade.

If you are upgrading from v8.x (Edition v2.x) to v9.x (Edition v3.x), see Migrating to v9 for the one breaking change (AI-Memory moved from cloud drives to a git repo).

Documentation

Full documentation lives in the GitHub wiki:

• The 10 tenets and what they prevent
• Every shipped instruction and skill, with rationale
• Slash-prompt reference
• Plugin Mall catalog and how to contribute
• Model compatibility and the open MAN.8.3 capability-floor question
• Brain upgrade lifecycle
• Migrating to v9 (AI-Memory breaking change)

Source and feedback

• Source: github.com/fabioc-aloha/Alex_ACT_Extension
• Issues: github.com/fabioc-aloha/Alex_ACT_Extension/issues
• Q&A: github.com/fabioc-aloha/Alex_ACT_Extension/discussions
• In-product feedback: /feedback in Copilot Chat after install

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. See LICENSE. Non-commercial use is unrestricted; commercial use requires a separate agreement.