# Mode-Adaptive Cadence

> Vary the agent's loop interval based on current salience — fast when signal is high, slow when nothing is happening — instead of burning ticks at a fixed rate.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Cognition & Introspection
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/mode_adaptive_cadence/

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## Description
**Intent**: A fixed tick rate either wastes compute during quiet stretches or adds latency during bursts. Adaptive cadence makes the agent spend compute where the signal actually is.

**Context**: The agent's workload is bursty: long quiet stretches punctuated by intense periods of active user engagement, close deadlines, or rapid incoming events. Salience signals are already available — affect levels, recency of external input, salience scores on recent ticks — but the loop interval is a single fixed number in config.

**Solution**: Define two (or more) modes with different sleep intervals (idle ≈60s, intense ≈15s). Score each tick's outcome for salience or external impulse; if it crosses a threshold, lock into intense mode for N ticks. Otherwise drift back to idle. Write mode transitions to the ledger. The user can force a mode but cannot bypass the configured floor and ceiling. Lock-in cannot be self-extended without an explicit external trigger.



## Use Cases
- The agent runs as a long-lived loop and idle tick cost is observable and worth reducing.
- Salience signals (new events, user activity, scheduled fires) are reliable enough to drive cadence decisions.
- Both responsive and idle behavior matter — fixed cadence wastes one or the other.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Compute spend tracks actual signal rate rather than burning at a fixed budget

- Latency on salient events drops without paying for it during idle stretches

- Mode transitions are visible in telemetry as their own diagnostic signal




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Threshold tuning is empirical and per-deployment; wrong thresholds hurt either latency or cost

- Mode flapping at the threshold edge wastes ticks on transitions

- More than two modes adds complexity quickly







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/mode-adaptive-cadence/)