Loop Phases: Detailed Walkthrough

A stage-by-stage companion to The Cognitive Loop. Each cycle of brain/ORRIN_loop.py runs these phases in order; the whole substrate runs every cycle, but deliberate cognition only when the ignition gate fires.

1. Perceive

Non-blocking gather of filesystem changes (fs_perception.py), UI/agent events, incoming messages, and host telemetry, under a time budget so perception can't stall the loop.

2. Recall

Embedding-based retrieval (similarity + recency + per-memory strength), with a keyword-overlap fallback when embeddings are unavailable. See Memory System.

3. Prepare workspace

Subsystems emit candidate contents; binding composes co-occurring fragments into unified situation candidates. All candidates enter the salience competition (Binding and Workspace Writeback).

4. Ignition

should_think() weighs salience, uncertainty, control-signal spikes, prediction error, goal drift, and stagnation to decide reactive vs. deliberate. A periodic floor prevents indefinite silence.

5. Select function/action

The contextual bandit scores functions from learned value plus control signals, demands, the workspace prior, and predicted cost; the action arbiter resolves the pick (Action Selection and Bandit).

6. Execute

The chosen function runs; generated code runs in a sandbox (sandbox_runner.py). Durable outputs are recorded on the effect ledger.

7. Reward accounting

Immediate reward is assigned now (finalize_cycle), and delayed credit is queued for the evaluator daemons to reconcile later (Learning and Adaptation).

8. Persist

Durable state and WAL checkpoints are written; goal-step attempts are persisted so a restart can't desync progress.

9. Maintain

Health checks, housekeeping, and supervisor heartbeats.

10. Idle / consolidate

At a low-power cadence: memory consolidation, replay, embedding pipeline work, and closed-time accounting.

Code pointers

• brain/ORRIN_loop.py, brain/loop/ — the loop and phase implementations
• brain/loop/deliberate.py — the deliberate path taken on ignition