Agents & Cognition · 06.14
Command Model & Heartbeat
The autonomous orchestrator's command-and-control loop and liveness heartbeat.
A fractal briefing: the same code for an orchestrator and a domain manager
The Command Model fuses three things Agentis already tracks separately into one resident briefing for any agent that manages rather than merely responds: what it owns (its scoped inventory of apps, workflows, and specialists), its progress (run outcomes over a 7-day window, with an explicit delta since it last reviewed via a persisted watermark, plus a 30-day outcome-momentum trend), and its minds (recent learnings from the Apps it oversees that never otherwise reached chat). The exact same code path serves the top-level orchestrator reviewing the whole workspace and a domain manager reviewing just its own sector — a genuine fractal, not two implementations that happen to look similar.
Progress is reported as semantic outcomes — declared labels like leads_qualified or meetings_booked counted per completed run — not bare run counts, so a briefing reflects what the work actually achieved, capped to the 6 most attention-worthy items and 5 most relevant app minds so it stays a briefing, not a data dump.
The heartbeat: surface by default, act only when told to
On a regular cadence, the heartbeat sweeps every orchestrator and manager (bounded to 25 per tick) and builds each one's Command Model to detect what needs attention — a failed run, a pending in-scope approval. Two postures, chosen per workspace:
| Posture | Behavior | Spend |
|---|---|---|
SURFACE (default) | Log the attention signal and emit an event. The manager's next real chat turn already leads with the same attention in its briefing, so nothing is lost — the heartbeat just makes it timely instead of waiting for someone to ask. | Zero |
ACT (opt-in) | When autonomy is enabled for the workspace, drive a bounded autonomous review turn so the manager acts unbidden — resolving approvals, replaying failed runs, dispatching specialists — through the reach layer. | One bounded turn |
A standing failure is deduplicated per agent by an attention signature, so the same unresolved problem doesn't get re-surfaced on every single tick — it's raised once, then left alone until something actually changes.
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How an agent hands a bounded task to a resolved teammate and awaits the result, with budget and attribution threaded through so no spend is anonymous.
One universal chat harness backs every channel, so permission modes and turn behavior are identical whether you're on the dashboard, Slack, or WhatsApp.