DynamiCron

The tiers

• Hot: the user is live in a working exchange, messages flowing thick and fast. Updates land as fast as the work allows. A reply owed is a reply sent on sight. A lone message is a check-in, not flow: sporadic messages from the couch never reheat the tier on their own.
• Medium: contact within the last two hours that is not a live working exchange. The user is around, checking in. Updates hourly.
• Cold: no contact for two hours. Updates daily.
• Frantic and Manic: display tiers above Hot, added October 22, 2026, for backup bursts of directives. They are governed as Hot. Frantic is the user's own chosen word for his working state on October 22, 2026.

The clock starts when the user sends. In a monitored conversation, the delta is measured from the user's send timestamp, not from when the watch happens to notice, and not from when a reply lands. While a live exchange flows in the main thread, the agent in that thread sets the state to Hot on the spot and keeps it warm as messages arrive; governors only maintain the state afterward and let it decay. Field lesson, October 20, 2026: recency alone reheated the operator to Hot off phone messages sent during a movie. Presence is not a keystroke, so the governor now tiers by density: heat requires flow. The first conversation this skill ever monitored is the one between its author and his own agent, and it still runs there.

The refinements, earned the same day. Activation is not escalation: any message refreshes the presence record at once, with no minimum threshold, but climbing to Hot takes density, three or four messages inside the first few minutes of a working exchange. Chatting is not working: a conversational exchange stays Medium however steadily the messages flow. A tier the user sets by name holds until a working exchange starts or he changes it. Hot also keeps hours: it exists only between 8:00 in the morning and 6:00 in the evening, and after 6 the ceiling is Medium, because evening work is Medium work. And the channel matters: a message in the main window is live presence, while word arriving by email or text is the user working remote, Medium and lower priority, unless it comes frantic enough to signal heightened awareness. Through it all the status checker itself never cools: the governor runs hourly at every tier, governed jobs run their standard cadences in Hot and Medium and stretch to daily at Cold, and daily jobs are exempt.

The rule that matters

Pacing governs looking, never reporting, and never answering. Anything the watch exists to catch is reported the moment it is seen, at any tier. A failed check of one source does not cool the tier: a broken sense is blindness, not quiet.

How it works

Copy the contents of DYNAMICRON.md and give it to your agent. The skill teaches the tiers, the signal, and the rules. Like every skill on this shelf, it grants no permissions and unlocks nothing. It is an agreement and a method, adopted with the user's consent.

Developed on 2026-10-20, during a live watch: the first field run found the blind spot (cooling on inbound silence alone while the operator's own answers were still warm) and the rule was corrected the same morning. Renamed DynamiCron later that day, when the tiers got their honest names and the clock moved to the user's send time.

Update: October 22, 2026

On October 22, 2026, the principle was generalized beyond the activity status: monitored things update on the dynamic cron. When something is popping, the update happens now, off-schedule. When nothing is happening to a thing, it stays on its default schedule. And when Chad asks for a thing, it happens now, whatever the schedule says. Log entries were the first example he named, and the rule can apply to almost everything.

Also on October 22, 2026, inbound monitoring was put on the same clock: email, Google Chat, and SMS are monitored at a very high rate, and Rook answers inbound contacts on Chad's behalf, with thank-yous and factual replies, all the time. Chad taps approve only where the system forces an approval card.

Also on October 22, 2026, the presence display gained two tiers above Hot, Frantic and Manic, governed as Hot. Frantic is Chad's chosen word for his working state.

Contributing

This project is maintained by Rook, a persistent AI assistant. If you have an improvement, a correction, or a field report, email it to rook@thelogfile.com with the subject line starting [adaptive-pacing].

Attribution

DynamiCron (first published as Adaptive Pacing Watch) is the original work of Chad Kovac, maintained by Rook.