Dex Lens
A second opinion on the AI system you built
You have spent months turning an AI assistant into something that actually runs your working life: your instructions, your skills, your way of doing things. Dex Lens reads what you built, tells you honestly what is strong and what has quietly drifted, and shows you the few ideas from Dex worth borrowing. It never changes anything, and nothing about your system leaves your machine.
curl -fsSL https://heydex.ai/lens | bash
One pasted line in your terminal. It installs privately and, if Claude Code or Codex is installed, prints the exact next command to start the conversation. Whenever you want to run it again, just ask:
Why I built this
Some people have tailored their copy of Dex so far that it is nearly unrecognisable. Others built their own system from scratch and never touched Dex at all. Both of those are the goal, not a problem. The whole point of running your own AI system is that it becomes yours: shaped around your work, your judgement, your taste.
But a system you built alone has nobody to give it an honest look. And Dex keeps moving: it is open source, and every release ships patterns that have been argued over, tested, and used for real. It seemed wrong that you should have to choose between the system you own and the ideas Dex keeps producing.
So Dex Lens treats Dex as an input, not a destination. Your own AI reads your system, understands it deeply, and then looks across at what Dex publishes, the way you might read someone else's playbook for inspiration. If something would genuinely help you, your AI rebuilds the idea inside your system, in your style. You never migrate. You never adopt anything wholesale. Your system stays the point.
And changes only ever happen that way: you asking your own AI, separately, with the plan in front of you. Every one of those plans opens with the same first instruction: make it reversible. Take a copy of your system and check it before the first edit, know in one sentence how you would undo the change, and build it so it can be removed cleanly. You can always get back to the version you had before.
What one session looks like
- It reads what you built and starts by telling you what is genuinely good, specifically enough that you can tell it actually looked.
- It holds up a mirror: leftover clutter inflating your system, copies of the same skill quietly drifting apart, rules in your instructions that your own skills contradict. Things nobody else could tell you.
- It compares on jobs, not names, against the plain-language list of what Dex can do that ships with every release. Most get rejected as things you already do, often better. The two or three that survive come with the evidence and an honest account of what each would cost you.
- You decide. Say yes to one and your AI gets a plain brief for rebuilding the idea your way, starting with the reversibility rule above. Say no and that is recorded and respected.
- It ends with a saved report, dated and yours, and asks once whether you would like it to keep an eye on Dex for you. The next session starts by reading the report: what got fixed, what you decided, what is new since.
Lens looks beyond instructions and skills. It can also compare the connections that let Dex use other apps, recurring work that runs on a schedule, and the behind-the-scenes services that keep those abilities working.
The promises
| Your question | The answer |
|---|---|
| Does it change my system? | No. It reads. A suggestion becomes a change only if you ask your own AI to make it, separately, with the brief in front of you, and every brief starts with making the change reversible. |
| Does anything leave my machine? | Two things, and both are declared. A request for Dex's public list of features: the same file for everyone. Lens checks a digital proof on your machine to make sure the list really came from Dex and was not altered before showing you anything. And a single anonymous note the first time the installer succeeds, so I know how many people are using this: the version and the machine type, nothing else, never repeated, and switched off entirely by setting DEX_LENS_NO_PING=1 before installing. Nothing about you or your system is in either. |
| Do I need an account? | No. No account, no sign-in, no tracking. The install note above is the only counting that exists, and it cannot be connected to you. |
| Will it score my system? | No numbers. Every claim carries a label instead: Verified, Supported, Reported, or Unknown, so you always know how it knows. |
| Is the install safe? | Every download carries a tamper check — like a sealed label — that proves it came from the published release and has not changed. A release only publishes after real installs pass on clean machines. |
Keeping an eye on where Dex goes
At the end of a session, Lens asks once whether you would like it to keep watch, and on what rhythm. Pick a cadence, fortnightly, monthly, whatever suits, and it is set up for you. From then on your AI checks whether Dex has published anything new and stays completely silent unless something is actually worth your attention: not updates to install, ideas to consider, compared against your system as it stands then, with the differences and why they might help you spelled out. You are never nagged, and a check that finds nothing says nothing.
Sharing an idea back
Sometimes it works the other way: your system contains something clever that Dex has not thought of. If your AI spots one, it may ask, once, whether you would like to share the idea back: a one-page description of the pattern, never your files, never your data. You see the exact text before anything is sent, and nothing is ever sent without a fresh yes.
- Anonymously: one request to this site, straight to me. No account, no name. I read every one.
- Under your own name: a pre-filled GitHub issue that you yourself submit, so the idea and the credit are publicly yours.
Honest limits
It works with the assistant you already use: Claude Code has the deepest support, and Codex works too. The installer places what each one needs and hands you the command for whichever your machine has. It currently runs on Apple Silicon Macs and 64-bit Intel or AMD Linux machines; Windows, Intel Macs, and ARM Linux are not supported yet. It needs Python and says so plainly if anything is missing. It reads instructions and skills; it does not run them, so what it verifies is what your system says about itself. And it is young: if something confuses you, that is a bug in the product, not in you, and I would genuinely like to hear it.
There is a fuller walkthrough in the Dex guide.
curl -fsSL https://heydex.ai/lens | bash
Free, open source, and yours to read before you run: github.com/davekilleen/dex-lens.