Introduction

flow-state-dev gives you blocks, flows, state, and streaming. Those are execution primitives. They don't have opinions about how an agent should think.

Thought Fabric is the cognitive layer. It's a separate framework built on top of flow-state-dev that models how agents manage attention, form memories, develop identity, perceive their environment, and reason about problems. Where flow-state-dev handles the "how does this run" question, Thought Fabric handles "how does this think."

The separation is deliberate. Not every flow needs cognition. A data pipeline that validates, transforms, and stores doesn't need working memory or salience scoring. But an agent that maintains context across long conversations, prioritizes what matters, and behaves consistently across interactions does. Thought Fabric is for that second case.

The vision

Thought Fabric maps cognitive science concepts onto composable building blocks. The full architecture spans seven domains:

Domain	What it models	Status
Attention	What to focus on. Relevance filtering and salience scoring.	Shipped
Memory	What to remember. Bounded working memory with decay and eviction.	Shipped
Identity	How to behave. Perspective (role/expertise) and constitution (values/constraints).	Coming soon
Perception	How to interpret input. Sensory processing, context framing, signal extraction.	Coming soon
Reasoning	How to think. Structured deliberation, chain-of-thought, planning strategies.	Coming soon
Metacognition	How to self-monitor. Confidence calibration, strategy selection, self-correction.	Planned
Learning	How to improve. Pattern extraction, skill acquisition, feedback integration.	Planned

Each domain will export blocks, helpers, and resource definitions that compose with flow-state-dev primitives. A Thought Fabric block is a standard flow-state-dev block. You use it in sequencers, pass it as a tool, register it in flows. No special runtime, no separate execution model.

The goal isn't to simulate human cognition. It's to give agent builders a structured vocabulary for the cognitive behaviors they're already implementing ad-hoc. Instead of hand-rolling memory management or bolting salience heuristics onto prompt templates, you compose purpose-built blocks that handle these concerns with tested, configurable implementations.

What's shipped today

Memory is fully implemented. Working memory gives your agents a bounded, salience-scored store that tracks what stays in cognitive focus during a conversation. Entries decay over time using configurable strategies (ACT-R power-law by default). The workingMemoryCapture block extracts memories via LLM, persists them, and advances the decay clock. One line to add to a pipeline. See Memory.

Attention ships two blocks. filterRelevance does deterministic keyword-based relevance filtering: fast, no LLM, good for cutting noise before expensive operations. scoreSalience uses an LLM to score items along configurable dimensions (goal relevance, recency, novelty, emotional weight). Use them together: filter first, then score the survivors. See Attention.

Identity has placeholder types. perspective() and constitution() define the interfaces but throw "Not implemented" until the next wave. The design is set; the implementation is queued. See Identity.

Import paths

Use subpath exports for tree-shaking:

import { filterRelevance, scoreSalience } from '@thought-fabric/core/attention'
import { workingMemoryCapture, workingMemoryContextFormatter } from '@thought-fabric/core/memory'
import { perspective, constitution } from '@thought-fabric/core/identity'

Or import domain namespaces from the main package:

import { attention, memory, identity } from '@thought-fabric/core'
// attention.filterRelevance, memory.workingMemoryCapture, identity.perspective

The package depends on @flow-state-dev/core. Build core first if you hit type resolution issues.

Naming convention

Word order encodes the category:

Pattern	Category	Example
workingMemory[Verb]	Block or item	workingMemoryCapture, workingMemoryObserve
[verb]WorkingMemory	Helper (verb first)	addWorkingMemory, evictWorkingMemory

workingMemoryAdd is a block you compose in a pipeline. addWorkingMemory is a helper you call on a resource ref. The inversion tells you which is which without checking docs.