Terms of use

The Why Engine is an experimental research and creative instrument, offered free and as-is. It is a working experiment rather than a service with guarantees: it can be slow, it can be wrong, it can be down, and features can appear and disappear without ceremony. Using it means you are comfortable with that.

Using the site at all means you accept these terms and the privacy policy. If you do not, the remedy is simple: do not use it.

A verdict is machine-generated philosophical synthesis. It is produced by an engine reading a web of statements it wrote itself. It is something to think with — not a finding, not a diagnosis, not a recommendation.

Nothing here is professional advice — not medical, psychological, legal, financial, or safety advice — and nothing here creates a professional relationship of any kind. If a question is about your health, your money, your rights, or your safety, take it to a qualified person who is accountable to you. If you are in crisis, contact your local emergency services or a crisis line, not an engine.

Verdicts can be confidently wrong, and they are written to sound composed. Weigh them accordingly.

Every run costs real money and real machine time, so there are limits, and they are there to keep the engine open to everyone rather than to one machine asking on a loop.

• A daily limit applies. Do not attempt to evade, rotate around, or reverse it.
• No automated harvesting, sweeping, or asking in bulk, and no reselling access. Read runs by hand, as a person.
• Do not attempt to reach other people’s runs, the keeper’s key, what is stored behind this site, or any part of it not deliberately offered to you.
• Do not use the engine to generate content that is unlawful, or that targets or harasses a real person.
• Do not present a verdict as a human judgement, a professional opinion, or a statement from Devello Studios.

Access can be limited or withdrawn if any of this is ignored.

You own the questions you ask. Asking one here grants no ownership of it to anyone.

You may share, quote, publish, and reuse the verdicts and webs your runs produce, commercially or otherwise, with attribution to “The Why Engine by Devello Studios”. A link back is appreciated and never required beyond the credit.

Note that runs are link-readable: anyone with a run’s link can read it in full. There is no public feed — the archive on the home page lists only the runs your own browser started. The privacy policy covers what that means in practice.

The site design, the engine and its methods, the name, and the brand are © 2026 Devello Studios / Devello Inc., all rights reserved. Permission to reuse the output is not a licence to the software, the design, or the name, and attribution does not imply endorsement by or affiliation with Devello Studios.

The service may be changed, paused, restricted, or discontinued at any time, and runs may be removed. This is not a durable archive: if a run matters to you, keep your own copy of it.

These terms may change too. The effective date at the top moves when they do, and continuing to use the site after that is acceptance of the new version.

The service is provided as-is and as-available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. No promise is made that the engine will be available, correct, or preserved.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Devello Studios, Devello Inc., and everyone working on their behalf are not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages, nor for any loss arising from the use of the service or from anything decided on the strength of a verdict. Where a jurisdiction does not permit some of this, the parts it does permit still apply, and the rest is limited to the least extent that jurisdiction allows.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute arising from them belongs to the state and federal courts located in California. This is where the operator sits; it is not a claim about where you sit, and it does not remove consumer rights your own local law gives you.

Questions about these terms, permission requests, or anything that needs a human: devellostudios.com/contact. If you want to know what the engine is actually doing, the about page explains the mechanism.