Week 0x29

The Den task-management tooling, Docket, was originally inspired by early versions of Steve Yegge’s popular beads which provides agents with task management tools. But, like the rest of Gas Town, it was too flexible for my tastes, and Docket enforces a simple hierarchy relationship to tasks. I also aadded the concept of “jobs” which wrap some context around a tree of tasks, eventually for delegation to another host.

Tasks proved very powerful for keeping a model in the agent loop from wandering off objectives. But most models still like to stop too often and wait to be told to continue. So this week I worked a lot on “focus mode” which designates a job for a pair-stance loop and seeks to keep it going.

This has been a lot more work than expected. Unexpected bugs exposed to me that the agent loop state had gotten out of control: there were more than 12 different dimensions with almost as many state machines. Also, keeping the simple “one list of tasks” ability of ACP meaningful was difficult. I got it all working, but it just doesn’t feel good. My need for architectual beauty is not satisfied.

But on Friday night, I finally saw beyond the local optimum I had climbed to. I’m backing away from treating this as a “manage a loop” problem, and making Docket into a “manager of loops”. Navigating the task tree isn’t something we should ask models to do, simple and deterministic software handles this, well, deterministically.