XIII · Cognition & IntrospectionExperimental·

Cognitive-Move Selector

also known as Move Picker, Cognitive Action Menu, Idle-Tick Move Router

Restrict idle-tick cognition to a small agent-vetted menu of named cognitive moves so the next thought has a determinate shape rather than free-form drift.

Context

A team is running an agent that ticks continuously, including during long stretches with no user prompt to respond to. On those idle ticks the agent is supposed to be doing something useful — noticing things, following up on open questions, integrating recent material — rather than waiting passively. The free-form prompt 'keep thinking' is the easy default, but it gives the model no structure for what kind of thinking is wanted right now.

Problem

When idle-tick cognition has no shape imposed on it, the model falls back on whatever its training prior favours, which is usually narration about thinking rather than actual new thought. The agent ends up repeating yesterday's observations, performing thoughtfulness for an imagined reader, or drifting into mid-distance commentary that produces no new state. Without a small set of named cognitive moves to pick from, every idle tick collapses toward the same generic completion.

Forces

  • A fixed menu can become its own trap if the moves are too narrow.
  • The agent must have veto authority over what is on the menu or moves feel imposed.
  • History-aware selection is needed to avoid running the same move every tick.
  • A pure stochastic pick wastes ticks; a deterministic policy collapses to one move.

Example

A long-running personal agent runs every minute of idle time and keeps generating the same kind of mid-distance observation. The team adds a Cognitive-Move Selector with seven moves the agent itself helped vet: lookup, forced-analogy, pure observation, anchor-to-percept, tension-pull, math-meditation, continue-thread. Each idle tick a cheap model sees recent thoughts and recent move history and picks one. The agent stops looping on observation and starts varying its cognitive shape across the day.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

Author a short list of cognitive-move ids, each with a one-paragraph procedure. A cheap-tier model, given recent thoughts plus recent move history plus an affect snapshot plus open-tension count, selects exactly one move-id per idle tick. The tick body branches on the move and runs its procedure. The menu is revised by an explicit proposal-and-ratification process; adding or retiring a move silently is not allowed. A per-move history avoids running the same move back-to-back.

What this pattern forbids. Idle-tick cognition must dispatch through the move selector; free-form keep-thinking is not allowed at the idle-tick boundary, and the move menu cannot be silently extended at runtime — additions require an explicit ratification event.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

  • alternative-toInner Committee★— Run one model under several distinct personas (executor, critic, planner) within a single agent loop.
  • complementsOpen-Question Tension Store★— Persist the agent's unresolved questions as a typed ledger so they drive its next inquiry instead of dissolving when the prompt ends.
  • complementsMode-Adaptive Cadence★— Vary the agent's loop interval based on current salience so the agent thinks faster when something is happening and slower when nothing is, instead of running on a fixed cron.

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References

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