Three rhythms, not one loop

A lot of what Sapix does happens when no one is looking. It refines raw captures into proper notes, proposes links between them, catches duplicates, and every so often steps back and reorganizes. The mistake would be to run all of that on one timer. It runs on three, on purpose, because a mind does not maintain itself on a single beat.

• The Reflex loop is fast and cheap. Integrity checks: is the database intact, is the vault where it should be, did a capture fail and need a retry. It is allowed to just run, no approval, because it changes nothing you would want to review.
• The Circadian loop is the daily pass. This is where the real consolidation happens: refining the day’s captures into notes, suggesting links, normalizing tags, summarizing what moved. It mostly proposes rather than acts, because the daily work is where it could get something wrong and I want a say.
• The Epochal loop is slow and rare. It looks across the whole graph for the bigger moves: two notes that should merge, one note that is really three ideas and should split, a cluster of linked notes that has quietly become a conclusion of its own. This is the loop that is supposed to surprise you.

The split is not just engineering tidiness. It mirrors how memory actually maintains itself. You have reflexes that fire without thought, a daily cycle, a lot of it during sleep, that consolidates the day into something durable, and a slower restructuring that reorganizes what you know over months. Different work belongs on different clocks. Forcing it all onto one would make either the cheap checks too slow or the deep restructuring too frequent and too risky.

The governance follows the rhythm. The fast loop is trusted to act on its own. The slower ones, the ones doing real interpretive work, propose and wait for a yes. The further a loop reaches into meaning, the more it has to ask first.