Agents & Cognition · 06.13
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.
An App bundles typed collections, agent-authored surfaces, and orchestration — the product primitive a standalone workflow auto-wraps into.