Installation

Requirements

Python 3.10 or newer
No other runtime dependencies for the interpreter itself. pytest is only needed if you want to run the test suite.

Sense has no compiled/bytecode form yet — the reference implementation is a tree-walking interpreter. This is a deliberate Phase 1 simplification (see Roadmap), not a permanent constraint on the language.

Install

pip install sense-lang

That’s it — no other runtime dependency for the interpreter itself. Add [anthropic] (pip install sense-lang[anthropic]) or [openai] if you want to use inference(...) with that provider — both are optional because picking inference("mock", ...) instead of a real provider is what keeps a program offline, not something ask() does on its own; neither extra is needed for that path. Add [mcp] similarly for connect_mcp(...) (pip install sense-lang[anthropic,openai,mcp] for everything).

Verify it worked

sense --version

sense 0.20.0

If sense isn’t on your PATH, call the module directly instead: python -m sense_lang run fib.sns.

Building from source

Only needed for contributing to Sense itself — running programs doesn’t require it.

git clone <repo-url>
cd sense
python -m venv .venv

.venv\Scripts\python -m pip install -e .[dev]

source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .[dev]

The [dev] extra pulls in pytest:

pytest -q

Covers the lexer (indentation tracking included), parser, interpreter semantics, error paths, agent pause/resume, and every example program.

sense/
  docs/               This documentation site (Mintlify)
  src/sense_lang/      The interpreter: lexer, parser, AST, environment,
                       interpreter, CLI
  examples/           Runnable .sns programs, one per major feature
  tests/              The pytest suite

Previewing this site locally

This is a standard Mintlify project (docs.json + MDX pages), live at docs.sensecode.dev:

Install the CLI: npm i -g mint
Preview locally: mint dev from inside docs/ (defaults to http://localhost:3000)

As of this writing, npx mint@latest intermittently fails to resolve one of its own internal dependency versions (@mintlify/models) — an upstream registry issue, not something wrong with this project. If mint dev fails to install, it’s worth simply retrying, or pinning an explicit recent mint version.

​Requirements

​Install

​Verify it worked

​Building from source

​Previewing this site locally

Requirements

Install

Verify it worked

Building from source

Previewing this site locally