Epiphany/schemas/heartbeat-state-schema.md

Heartbeat State Schema

Epiphany's heartbeat store is the typed initiative and routine-state organ for the swarm.

The executable truth lives in heartbeat_state.rs.

Store Identity

• document type: epiphany.agent_heartbeat
• schema version: epiphany.agent_heartbeat.v0
• key: default

Related emitted schemas:

• ghostlight.initiative_schedule.v0
• epiphany.void_routine.v0
• epiphany.agent_heartbeat_status.v0

Top-Level Fields

The heartbeat store currently carries:

• target heartbeat rate
• scene clock
• selection policy
• pacing policy
• participants
• history
• optional routine/sleep surfaces:
  • sleep_cycle
  • memory_resonance
  • incubation
  • thought_lanes
  • bridge
  • candidate_interventions
  • appraisals
  • reactions

The routine surfaces now have a little more anatomy than they used to:

• incubation.sourceCoverage
  • versioned coverage receipt for which role families and memory kinds have been feeding the current routine
• incubation.themes[*]
  • now include noveltyToSelf, noveltyToRoom, saturationScore, refractoryPenalty, supportCount, evidenceDiversity, explorationBonus, priorityScore, status, and short holding/attraction lines
• bridge.sourceCoverage
  • mirrored terrain coverage for the bridge decision layer
• bridge.topicSaturation
  • repeated-theme pressure derived from both bridge syntheses and current incubating themes
• bridge.refractoryTopics
  • temporary cooling records for seams the machine has been worrying too hard

Participant Shape

Each participant tracks:

• agent_id
• role_id
• display_name
• arena
• participant_kind
• initiative_speed
• next_ready_at
• reaction_bias
• interrupt_threshold
• current_load
• status
• constraints
• last action metadata
• optional pending_turn
• optional mood_timing
  • cooldown_multiplier
  • scalar timing pressures: anxiety, urgency, arousal, thought_pressure, guardedness, reaction_intensity
  • emotional_dimensions: the 32-axis current affect vector used by utterance-state projection, including anger, despair, sadness, fear, contempt, annoyance, dismissal, flippancy, tenderness, warmth, shame, pride, fatigue, secrecy, hesitation, emotional containment, and command force

Maintenance participants are the standing Epiphany organs. Scene participants reuse the same timing law for Ghostlight-style character turns.

Key Policy

The important semantics are:

• cooldown starts after turn completion, not launch
• a participant with a pending turn should not be woken again
• calm systems can slow toward sleep
• urgent systems can raise tempo and concurrency
• idle turns are for rumination, not fake work
• sleep/dream passes are the intended distillation window
• a live, unsaturated thought is allowed to sit and deepen without performing a fake novelty errand every pass
• novelty is split in two on purpose:
  • noveltyToSelf asks whether the swarm is repeating itself
  • noveltyToRoom asks whether the swarm-facing surface has already been fed the same seam
• saturation and refractory cooling exist to keep one rewarding theme from annexing the whole machine

Relation To Organ State

Heartbeat is physiology, not identity.

Organ-state records describe what an organ is. Heartbeat describes how often it gets the floor, how reactive it is, and how current pressure bends that timing.

Current emotional state is heartbeat physiology. Appraisals write a bounded named affect vector into mood_timing; utterance state consumes that live vector before falling back to slower organ-state traits. If anger, despair, annoyance, dismissal, flippancy, or any other speech-relevant feeling is meant to color a voice, it must exist here or in the typed appraisal feeding this field, not only as prose in a prompt.

Birth-time repo personality may seed heartbeat timing once. After that, routine state, appraisal, mood, continuity pressure, and live work should carry the motion.