XIII · Cognition & IntrospectionEmerging★

Preoccupation Tracking

also known as Mid-Term Working Memory, Affect-Tagged Concerns, Background Chewing

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.

Context

A team is running a long-lived agent whose memory has two extremes: a single 'current focus' slot that names what the agent is working on right now, and a long-term insight store that holds distilled lessons across months. Between those there is no place for the handful of things the agent is genuinely chewing on across days — an ongoing worry about a project, an anticipation, a curiosity it keeps returning to.

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.

Forces

  • A cap is needed or preoccupations crowd out everything else.
  • Decay must be automatic; the agent left to itself will not let go.
  • Affect tagging is what makes a preoccupation different from a todo.
  • Display every tick costs tokens, but invisibility defeats the point.

Example

A long-running personal agent has a 'current focus' slot that holds one item and a long-term insight store that is too distilled. Mid-tier concerns — a project the user is wrestling with, a relationship issue they keep returning to — either crowd out the active focus or fall off the back of the context window. The team adds preoccupation-tracking: a capped list of 5–8 affect-tagged concerns with topic, intensity, and last-touched, decaying with a 7-day half-life, surfaced as a sidebar in every tick prompt. Mid-tier context now persists across days without overwhelming the foreground.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

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.

What this pattern forbids. The active preoccupation list is hard-capped at the configured size; new entries displace the coldest, and intensity decays automatically — the agent cannot extend the cap or freeze decay from inside the loop.

The smaller patterns that complete this one —

  • usesSalience Attention Mechanism★— Score every candidate memory item with a weighted salience function so each tick attends to a small, relevant top-k subset rather than re-reading all memory.

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

  • complementsFive-Tier Memory Cascade·— Stage agent memory across sensory, working, short-term, episodic, and long-term tiers with explicit promotion and decay between them.
  • complementsAwareness★— Maintain the agent's explicit knowledge of its own tools, capabilities, environment, and current context as queryable state.
  • alternative-toScratchpad★★— Give the agent a writable scratch space for intermediate notes that informs later turns but does not pollute the response.
  • 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.
  • complementsCommitment Tracking·— Extract stated intents from each agent turn into a structured ledger with open / followed-through / expired status, making the gap between promise and follow-through visible and auditable.

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Used in frameworks

References

Provenance