Descartes

doubt, until what remains is certain.

🔭 Sibling project: The Asker — today's AI answers, this one asks.

The Asker learns to ask the sharpest questions to understand a subject; Descartes learns to doubt until what remains is certain. Two halves of one idea: the right question beats the confident answer. → https://github.com/pranjalbhatia710/the-asker

🪶 Landing page →  ·  descartes --epigraph for a passing thought from the man himself.

An MCP server that, on a prompt, doubts every decision in a plan, doubts its own doubts, and answers them — grounding every answer in real evidence — iterating until the plan stops producing new load-bearing doubts. Then it hands back a refined plan plus the few decisions only you can make.

The point: no unexamined assumption reaches the work, so hallucination has no room to hide.

The loop

On a prompt, Descartes runs recursive Cartesian doubt:

1. Draft the plan / decisions.
2. Doubt every load-bearing decision (one of 11 doubt operators per doubt).
3. Doubt the doubts — prune the trivial and manufactured ones.
4. Answer each surviving doubt only from real evidence:
   • code doubts → resolved from the context you pass in,
   • world doubts → resolved via Exa (cited, confidence-scored),
   • ungroundable → marked NEEDS_HUMAN.
5. Doubt the answer — recurse: each settled answer is itself doubted (the question behind the question), spawning the next layer of doubts, bounded by depth and a global doubt budget.
6. Bank it — every grounded finding accumulates into a knowledge base that feeds the next round of doubting and the final plan.
7. Revise the plan with what survived, and repeat from step 2.

The output is therefore a doubt tree (each entry carries depth + parent), not a flat list, plus a knowledge_base of accumulated facts.

Stopping rule: the loop stops the moment a full pass produces no new load-bearing doubt — that is convergence. It might be pass 3 or pass 9. 20 is a hard ceiling, never a target, and recursion is bounded by DESCARTES_MAX_DEPTH (default 3) and DESCARTES_DOUBT_BUDGET (default 64). It never manufactures doubt to keep going.

Grounding rule: every answer resolves against real evidence or becomes a question for you. Low-confidence Exa is never asserted. 20 rounds of self-answered, ungrounded doubt would be 20 rounds of confident hallucination — so that is forbidden by construction.

Two engines (auto-selected)

EXA_API_KEY is independent: set it to ground world doubts in any mode.

No keys? It still works — with just Claude

You do not need any API keys. Inside an MCP client that supports sampling (Claude Code), the whole loop runs on the client's own Claude model — code doubts are resolved by reading the context you pass in, and anything that needs an external fact or a human decision is handed back to you.

And if even sampling isn't available, Descartes does not guess. It will not fake-confirm a doubt from keyword matching; it surfaces every load-bearing doubt as a question in needs_user and tells you so. Every doubt() result carries an engine and a plain-English note describing exactly how it was powered, so a degraded run is never silent. The one rule it never breaks: no answer without evidence — otherwise, ask you.

3-step setup

# 1. install
git clone https://github.com/pranjalbhatia710/descartes-mcp && cd descartes-mcp
pip install -e .

# 2. (optional) bring your own keys — copy names only, fill in your .env
cp .env.example .env        # .env is gitignored; never commit it

# 3. run it (stdio MCP server)
descartes                   # or: descartes --selftest   to prove the loop converges
descartes --demo            # watch it doubt, live, in your terminal

Watch it work

descartes --demo runs a scripted doubt session and renders it live — a spinner while it thinks, a self-drawing doubt tree (◆ top-level, ↳ recursion), colour-coded statuses (✓ confirmed · ✗ refuted · ⚑ for you), the knowledge base filling, and a CONVERGED banner.

Inside Claude Code, the real doubt() tool reports the same events to the client as MCP progress + log notifications, so you see it working as it runs. It never prints to stdout — that channel is the MCP protocol. Set DESCARTES_VERBOSE=1 to also stream compact progress to the server's stderr log.

Add to Claude Code

Add this to your Claude Code MCP config (e.g. .mcp.json in your project, or via claude mcp add). Keys live in your shell / config env — never in committed files:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "descartes": {
      "command": "descartes",
      "args": [],
      "env": {
        "FIREWORKS_API_KEY": "${FIREWORKS_API_KEY}",
        "EXA_API_KEY": "${EXA_API_KEY}",
        "OPENROUTER_API_KEY": "${OPENROUTER_API_KEY}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Then ask Claude to "use descartes to doubt this plan" and pass the relevant files as context.

Tools

doubt(prompt, context="", max_passes=20)

Runs the loop above. Returns:

{
  "passes_used": 4,
  "converged": true,
  "plan": "<the refined, doubt-hardened plan>",
  "doubt_log": [
    { "id": 1, "pass": 1, "depth": 0, "parent": null,
      "operator": "assumption", "doubt": "...", "kind": "code",
      "status": "CONFIRMED|REFUTED|UNKNOWN|NEEDS_HUMAN",
      "resolution": "...", "source": "..." }
  ],
  "doubt_tree": [ { "depth": 0, "children": [ { "depth": 1, "children": [] } ] } ],
  "knowledge_base": [
    { "claim": "...", "verdict": "CONFIRMED", "evidence": "...", "source": "...", "depth": 0 }
  ],
  "needs_user": [ "<the few decisions only you can make>" ],
  "engine": "claude-sampling",
  "note": "<plain-English: how this run was powered>",
  "max_depth_reached": 2
}

doubt_log is the flat record (each entry stamped with depth + parent); doubt_tree is the same data nested; knowledge_base is everything Descartes grounded along the way, which it builds on instead of re-deriving.

needs_user is the product: it separates what Descartes resolved itself from what it genuinely needs you for. Kept short — the truly blocking ones only.

ground(query)

Exa deep search → cited, confidence-scored facts. Used inside the loop; callable directly. Low confidence → status: "UNKNOWN" (never asserted).

verdict(result)

Pass a doubt() result. Returns { proceed, blocking_questions }. proceed is true only if the plan converged with no open load-bearing doubt; otherwise you get the blocking questions.

Doubt operators

Every doubt is tagged with one operator (shipped as data in descartes/operators.py):

assumption · falsify · inversion · named_source · edge_case · quantify · root_cause · reversibility · second_order · define · deletion

Benchmarks — how much better is doubting?

The honest metric isn't accuracy (that tracks whatever model you plug in). It is: of a plan's load-bearing assumptions, how many reach the work unexamined? On a seeded fixture of 6 real-shaped plans with 19 hand-labeled assumptions (benchmark/coverage.py):

Unexamined assumptions reaching the work fall from 100% → 0%. Of the 19 it surfaces, Descartes grounds 12 itself and hands you only the 7 that genuinely need a human. This is the conservative floor — deterministic, in the spirit of The Asker's synthetic floor. A real model only widens the gap by catching assumptions the labels missed and recursing deeper.

Convergence (benchmark/bench.py) — it stops the moment a pass adds no new doubt, and a runaway is capped:

Convergence is exactly depth + 1 passes and never exceeds 20. Both benchmarks run in CI on every push.

Part of a bigger idea — meet The Asker

Descartes has a sibling: The Asker — "Today's AI answers. This one asks." An RL environment where an agent learns to understand any subject by asking the sharpest questions, watching a field of candidates collapse to the truth in as few questions as possible, and beating frontier models that just guess.

They are two halves of one thesis: the right question beats the confident answer. Guessing is where hallucination comes from; both tools replace it with questioning.

• The Asker asks, to understand — it learns, by reward alone, which question removes the most uncertainty.
• Descartes doubts, to be certain — it questions every decision, then recursively questions its own answers, until nothing unexamined remains.

Point The Asker at a subject and watch it learn what to ask. Point Descartes at a plan and watch it refuse to guess. → github.com/pranjalbhatia710/the-asker

Development & tests

pip install -e ".[dev]"      # pytest + ruff
ruff check descartes/ tests/ benchmark/
pytest -q                    # tests, no network (all backends are mocked)
python -m benchmark.bench    # convergence benchmark (see Benchmarks above)
python -m benchmark.coverage # coverage benchmark (see Benchmarks above)

The suite locks down the load-bearing invariants: the loop always terminates and never exceeds the hard ceiling of 20, it converges as soon as a pass adds no new doubt, it recurses (questioning its own answers) bounded by depth and a node budget, nothing is asserted without evidence (ungroundable → NEEDS_HUMAN, low-confidence Exa → UNKNOWN), needs_user is exactly the NEEDS_HUMAN doubts, and panel disagreement escalates to the human. tests/test_regressions.py carries one guard per bug found by the adversarial audit. CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs lint + tests + the self-test + both benchmarks on Python 3.10–3.13.

Safety

• Bring your own keys. Read from env only (os.environ.get), never stored, never logged, never committed. .env is gitignored; .env.example has names only.
• Every external call is wrapped in try/except + timeout + retry — one failure never kills a run.
• Exa results are cached and time-boxed so a pass stays fast; panel size is capped on the live path (DESCARTES_PANEL_SIZE).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.