Attention and focus

Two opposing forces, one policy: DreamLayer must be able to interrupt you out loud when a moment genuinely demands it, and must be able to shut up completely when you demand that. The attention policy decides the first; Focus mode enforces the second; the proactive-cue picker tunes everything in between.

The hark — "Listen!" and "Watch out!"

A hark is the system tapping you on the shoulder: one line, one ring, an earcon, a haptic.

orchestrator/attention.py: AttentionPolicy.evaluate(ctx, commitments) scans the same live Context the anticipation engine sees and produces at most a handful of ranked alerts:

The discipline that keeps it from nagging:

• One hark at a time — attention_tick speaks only the single most important fresh alert, watch-outs ranked first.
• A 30-minute per-key cooldown — the same alert cannot repeat inside half an hour, and a key is only marked consumed if the hark actually spoke (a veil- or focus-suppressed hark does not burn the alert).
• The hark call itself adds a second 120-second cooldown across all harks.
• Normal harks are held during Focus; urgent watch-outs pierce it. Everything is silenced by the Veil.
• set_attention(False) (the phone's "Proactive alerts" toggle, or "Hey Oracle, stop keeping watch") mutes the policy entirely.

The heartbeat: pulse(context) — or the background start_pulse(context_fn, interval=15.0) — runs anticipation and attention together on one context snapshot. Seam: the live context feed (place, people in view, clock) that a device build supplies to the pulse.

Focus mode

set_focus(minutes) — default 25 by voice ("Hey Oracle, focus mode") — turns the interruptions down while capture keeps running. That second half is the difference from Incognito, which pauses capture itself.

Held while Focus is active: anticipation cards, live caption display, message pop-ups, fact-check cards, delivery reads, answer-ahead, commitment-capture confirmations, and normal harks. Still running underneath: the ledger, the user model, commitment tracking, and recall on demand. Still allowed through: urgent watch-outs, and anything you explicitly ask for.

clear_focus() ends it early; focus_active() reports it; turning Focus on from the phone also unlocks the Saga's Deep Focus badge.

The proactive-cue picker

Finer than on/off: set_cue(kind, on) mutes any of the three anticipatory kinds — event, person, place — before the engine's ranking pass, so you can keep "leave in 8 minutes" while silencing arrival reminders. The phone nests these three under its Proactive cards toggle. cue_kinds() reports current state.

The deviation nudge

Related but distinct: the Tell engine (tell_check) compares fresh transcript against your prior commitments and raises a DeviationAlertCard when the new words contradict the old plan — before-versus-now across a dashed divider, with a severity dot.

Who gets to interrupt — the summary