Nested loops

Different mistakes belong on different clocks.

If every error waits for a monthly review, the system will spend the month being wrong. If every twitch can rewrite the constitution, the system will have no constitution by Thursday.

So the experiment uses four nested cell routines. Each routine has a job, a write budget, a stop, and a pair of natural forces. The forces are physics. The clocks are when those forces are allowed to move something durable.

Reflex

Reflex is the in-run loop. Sense and Act. A host is in the middle of leased work. It can observe, take a side effect that costs tries, retry a tool, or stop because the next action hits a gate.

Reflex may not change identity, price, ICP, or the constitution. Reflex may not "learn" by writing durable memory. If the run produced evidence, that evidence waits for Transform on the next clock.

Sense work of kind sense_market does not debit try spend. Act work does. The image tick is not reflex.

On the covering cell, reflex stays split by force. Sense gets lists inside the Bound frame, enriches them, and builds packets. Act spends tries from those packets. The founder still signs sends.

This is the commit-gate idea from the agentic-evolution paper, applied at the smallest scale: the run may propose; the record commits later.

Adaptation

Adaptation is the daily working review. Bound and Transform. Cell owners post what ran, what failed, what they want to write into memory, and what they want to spend tomorrow.

Transform metabolizes Sense and Act into structured evidence or economics. Fitness counts. Activity does not. A daily note that cannot name an artifact is a status mood. Moods do not become memory.

Learning on this clock stays distinct. Bound adapts ICP and targets. Sense updates list, enrich, and door truth. Act updates try effectiveness. A useful packet does not prove the ICP. A signed send does not prove the list was good.

Defend can reject a write on this clock. Select does not rebalance the company here unless a cell is on fire.

Selection

Selection is weekly. Select and Defend. Which cells showed fitness? Which cells burned budget and produced only activity? Which specialists were worth the tokens?

Select reads fitness evidence, not activity counts. Eligibility comes before rank. Packets sent are not fitness.

The allocator, when one is provisioned, proposes attention and budget shifts. A single-cell owner may contain its own cell. That owner-led contain does not impersonate Select. The founder reviews irreversible items. A cell can be paused here without a theatrical postmortem.

Weekly is also where task-order and variance get a look. If the same "improvement" only works when the work arrives in a friendly sequence, that is a fragility signal, not a win.

Evolution

Evolution is monthly, or on strong evidence. Continue and Bound. Constitution and kill.

Did the market still match the rules we wrote down? Did an effector quietly become the founder? Did an improvement loop make the work worse? Is it time to stop a cell, stop an effector, or stop the experiment?

Evolution is allowed to change the constitution. Adaptation is not. That sounds obvious until a useful agent asks for a "small exception" seventeen days in a row. Continue keeps failed-experiment evidence inspectable. Bound keeps the membrane from drifting while the story gets better.

What a loop produces

Each loop should leave an artifact another person can read:

• Reflex: the run record, including the gate that fired and whether the work was Sense or Act.
• Adaptation: accepted and rejected writes; fitness versus activity.
• Selection: a selection note and a budget proposal that cites fitness.
• Evolution: a constitution diff, or an explicit "no change."

If the loop produced only a meeting, it did not happen.

Current state

These cadences are executable kernel definitions. The covering cell runs weekday loops on try-unit budgets. That is not a claim that the company is running them with customers. The journey log is where a dispatch says what actually ran.

Read what is not being built yet before assuming CRM, billing, or a commercial offer sit on these clocks.