Preoccupation Tracking
Maintain a small set of mid-term, affect-tagged concerns that persist across days and surface in every prompt, distinct from the single-item working focus and from long-term insights.
Problem
Because nothing represents the middle tier explicitly, mid-term concerns leak into one extreme or the other. They either crowd out the single focus slot and starve the immediate task of attention, or they drop off the back of the prompt window and quietly disappear before they resolve. The agent gives a misleading impression of either being singly focused on the wrong thing or having no continuity at all about what is really weighing on it.
Solution
Cap a list at 5-8 preoccupations stored as small JSON entries with topic, intensity (0..1), affect tag, opened-at, last-touched. Apply a 7-day half-life decay to intensity. When the cap is reached, release the coldest entry. Surface all current preoccupations in every tick prompt as a brief sidebar. The agent has explicit `touch` (raise intensity) and `release` (drop) operations.
When to use
- The agent runs across many sessions and has affective or motivational state that should persist between them.
- There are mid-term concerns (worries, interests, anticipations) that are too persistent for working memory and too volatile for long-term insights.
- Reasoning quality improves when the agent can reference its current concerns explicitly.
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