CACS
Circuit Adaptive Coordination System
In development
CACS is the coordination system Circuit Labs is developing. This overview describes the problem it is designed to address and the research priorities guiding the work.
The problem
Coordination is the hard part.
As autonomous systems take on more work across tasks and tools, the difficulty shifts away from any single system acting well. The difficulty is what happens between them.
Shared context has to stay useful as work moves. Permission boundaries have to be explicit rather than assumed. And the decisions that follow have to remain reviewable, so people can understand what was coordinated and on what basis.
Those are coordination challenges, and they are the ones CACS is being designed to address.
Research priorities
Three design goals.
Three priorities shape the research: shared context that stays useful, boundaries that are stated rather than assumed, and decisions that can be reviewed afterwards.
Maintaining useful shared context
A design goal for keeping independent systems aligned on the same goals, state, and constraints as work moves across tasks and tools — so coordination does not depend on any one system holding the whole picture.
Making authority and boundaries explicit
A design goal for stating clearly who and what may act, and under which conditions, so autonomy stays within limits that people can inspect and adjust rather than infer.
Producing traceable coordination decisions
A design goal for making coordinated decisions and actions reviewable after the fact — so it is possible to trace what happened, what it depended on, and why.
Where this is going
A coordination layer, still being researched.
CACS is our attempt to treat coordination as a first-class problem: shared context that stays useful, boundaries that are stated rather than assumed, and decisions that can be reviewed afterwards. This overview will describe what CACS can do once that work is established.
Next step
If this is your problem too, we would like to hear from you.
We are talking with teams working on systems that need to coordinate within defined rules, and with researchers evaluating the same questions.