Files

T

Andy Dixon d3daf6ba25 docs: volition, planning, agency and cognitive research

New documents define goal, want, intention, commitment, plan, action,
capability, authority, agency and introspection operationally, state
prominently that no operational measure establishes phenomenal
consciousness or sentience, and describe the rules, thresholds, events,
inspection points and limits of each subsystem:

- docs/volition.md: want derivation, reinforcement, decay and suppression,
  conflicts, formation and its outcomes, the intention–action gap,
  reconsideration, commitments and volition metacognition;
- docs/planning.md: plans and step kinds, validation, strategies, the
  executor, observe–act–verify, replanning, budgets, operator attention,
  long-running work, restarts and duplicates;
- docs/agency.md: the fifteen authority invariants and their tests,
  scoped authority, forensic why, attribution and the agency timeline;
- docs/cognitive-research.md: operational definitions separating
  implementation property from philosophical interpretation, experiment
  protocols (global workspace, ablation, self-model, counterfactual, model
  comparison, conflict), every measure, introspection accuracy,
  metacognitive calibration and temporal self-continuity.

Updated: interpretation table, capabilities (metadata, typed operations,
scoped grants, requests), cognition, snapshots (fork authority), security
and threat model (T14, T16, new T27–T29), architecture, README, changelog,
release notes, ADR-0012 and ADR-0013, and PLAN.md §8.10 status. The
unimplemented record_procedure internal step is removed from the
vocabulary; procedural memory is recorded when a plan completes.

2026-10-01 23:25:44 +01:00

2.9 KiB

Raw Blame History

ADR-0013: Validated plans and a stateless, restart-safe executor

Date: 2026-09-15
Status: Accepted

Context

Intentions need multi-step work: diagnose before acting, ask for access, act, check the result, try something else. The obvious designs are an agent loop that lets a model call tools until it is satisfied, or an in-memory workflow engine. The first puts authority and state inside a model; the second loses state on restart and invites duplicate actions.

Decision

A plan is a stored dependency graph of typed steps (capability, request capability, verify, monitor, wait, internal) with expectations, preconditions, assumptions, budget, completion criteria, abort conditions and the alternatives considered. Replans are new revisions; the old plan is kept and linked.
Validation is Go: acyclic dependencies, registered and unlocked capabilities only, schema-valid parameters, targets derived from parameters, read-only checks, closed vocabularies. Model proposals are parsed into the same structure and validated; fields claiming approval or completion are ignored and reported.
Deterministic strategies first (direct action with verification, diagnosis with a scoped log request, escalation that does not repeat a failed action); a model only when none applies; failed strategies are not reused.
The executor holds no plan state in memory. It claims a step with a conditional update, acts only through capabilities.Service.Invoke or RequestCapability, records the outcome and moves on. Every status transition is conditional on the expected previous status. A step found executing with an expired lease is resolved from records by origin; a non-idempotent step with no record is blocked for verification, never repeated.
Observe → act → verify: expectations become predictions with verification criteria, resolved by read-only observation; misses are prediction errors that weaken the supporting belief and trigger reconsideration.
Long-running steps persist their next run time; the executor is one scheduler-owned loop woken after cycles and by the event bus.

Consequences

A restart, a duplicate scheduler or a second daemon cannot run a step twice, and a crash mid-action cannot lead to a blind repetition.
Plans are inspectable as graphs with estimates, alternatives and validation, and every action links back to its step, plan and intention.
The deterministic strategies are narrow; broader objectives need model proposals, which may fail validation and then never run.
Verification is built in only for service.restart.

Alternatives considered

Model-driven tool loops: rejected; they make the model the authority and the storage of reasoning state.
An in-memory engine with checkpoints: rejected; checkpoints between an action and its record are exactly where duplicates come from.
Unconditional status writes with a global lock: rejected; conditional updates give the same safety without a lock and work across processes.

2.9 KiB Raw Blame History