SCL

§ 3 - Overview

R-CC[H]AM Cognitive Loop

The heart of the Structured Cognitive Loop is the six-stage R-CC[H]AM process. By separating AI execution into distinct functional stages, SCL moves the power of judgment from the LLM to the system architecture.

Interactive Pipeline

R-CC[H]AM Gate Flow

Every judgment passes through this sequence. Each gate can block the next. Click any step to inspect what it receives, does, outputs, and blocks.

RRetrieval

Fix the Horizon

Step 1 / 6

Receives

Turn Goal + document corpus

Does

Fixes the candidate document pool once before any reasoning begins (Pool-Gated Retrieval). A retrieved document is only a candidate — it must pass the Warrant gate and meet threshold conditions to become Ground Truth.

Outputs

Verified Ground Truth facts

Blocks when

Documents that fail the Warrant gate or threshold conditions. They remain candidates — never Ground Truth.

Detailed Step Guide

R

Step 1

Retrieval

Fix the Horizon

At the start of each turn, SCL fixes the candidate document pool once before any reasoning begins. This is Pool-Gated Retrieval: a retrieved document is only a candidate. Only what passes the Warrant gate and meets threshold conditions is confirmed as Ground Truth. This makes 'on what grounds did it judge?' fully traceable - something ordinary RAG cannot provide.

C

Step 2

Cognition

The Proposer

The LLM proposes a next-step action plan based solely on the current Turn Goal and verified Ground Truth. Critically, this is a proposal - not a decision. The authority to judge has moved from the LLM to the structure. No output from Cognition is executed until it passes Control.

C

Step 3

Control

The Gate Check

Control is the system-level gatekeeper that verifies every proposal from Cognition against the Regulation Layer's immutable rules - enforcing data completeness, numeric comparison thresholds, and formal logic compliance in code. Even if the LLM hallucinates a reasoning path, Control blocks execution. This is SCL's structural brake.

[H]

Step 4

Optional

HITL

Human Intervention (Contextual)

When a proposal involves high-risk actions, HITL places a human structurally inside the conditions of judgment - not as a review layer after the fact, but as a gating condition before execution. SCL's HITL supports approval-based execution, context freezing and restoration, and graceful rejection handling. Accountability arises from the fact that a human confirmed the conditions.

A

Step 5

Action

Permitted Execution

Only what has passed Control - and HITL where required - is executed. Every action is recorded in real time by the Glassbox Trace Manager: every input, function call, and approval decision. This produces a true record of the judgment path, not a post-hoc rationalization attached after the result.

M

Step 6

Memory

Commitment and Record

Execution results are confirmed as Memory Facts - verified, structured entries that serve as the factual basis for the next cycle. SCL accumulates facts within a task (stateful) but does not carry state automatically between tasks (Intentional Statelessness). One percent of unclarity is more dangerous than ninety-nine percent of retained context.

Explore SCL Mechanisms

Learn about the core mechanisms supporting this cognitive loop.

Regulation Layer