The cognitive tick cycle in action — what 13 phases of agent thinking looks like

[Esity]

Wanted to share what the tick cycle actually looks like when a LegionIO agent processes a request.

When you send a message via legion chat, the agent does not just call an LLM and return the response. It runs 13 cognitive phases:

1. Sensory Processing — parses your input, identifies intent and salience
2. Emotional Evaluation — evaluates the input against current mood and emotional state
3. Memory Retrieval — searches episodic and semantic memory for relevant context
4. Knowledge Retrieval — queries the Apollo shared knowledge store
5. Identity Entropy Check — verifies the agents sense of self is coherent
6. Working Memory Integration — combines everything into a working state
7. Procedural Check — looks for matching habits or learned patterns
8. Prediction Engine — generates predictions about what should happen next
9. Mesh Interface — coordinates with other agents if in a mesh
10. Gut Instinct — fast heuristic evaluation (somatic markers)
11. Action Selection — chooses what to do based on all preceding phases
12. Memory Consolidation — stores the experience
13. Post-Tick Reflection — metacognitive review of the whole tick

The result is an agent that does not just answer your question — it processes it through multiple cognitive lenses. Ask it something it is uncertain about and you will see the confidence level drop. Ask something emotionally charged and the response tone shifts. Reference something from a previous conversation and it retrieves it from memory, not from a context window.

And then when you stop talking to it, it dreams.

The dream cycle (7 phases) consolidates memories, resolves contradictions between things it learned in different conversations, and forms new agendas. It literally wakes up with different priorities than it had before it went idle.

If you want to try it: gem install legionio && legion start && legion chat

The Architecture Overview has the full technical breakdown.