Show HN: Cogency – Cognitive Architecture for AI Agents
4 comments
·July 12, 2025weego
It seems to me that every iteration of AI agent framework idea is taking us closer down the path to what is ultimately just an Actor framework where the mailbox is an AI agent instead of a code loop.
Someone should probably just cut out the middlemen and do exactly that. A mature Actor topology orchestrator with a set of node types varying from binary logic to full agentic loops would go a long way.
It might be more like Apache Storm than strictly an actor framework the more I think about it, but it's there somewhere.
EconomistFar
This is pretty cool, love seeing more opinionated starter kits that actually focus on developer experience and modern build performance. So many boilerplates get bloated fast.
What stands out is how Cogency tries to balance convention and flexibility, especially the way it handles routing and API hooks without locking you in too hard.
NoProfession
Skimmed through this, really like how clean the structure is. A lot of starter kits feel like they solve “hello world” but get messy fast when you scale.
lordofgibbons
Got any benchmarks to go along with it?
Unfortunately, there are a million different cognitive architectures out there, and there's no trivial way to filter through them.
Yesterday I built something that probably shouldn’t exist yet. In 9 hours, I created a cognitive architecture demonstrating emergent reasoning.
It follows a 5-step loop: Plan → Reason → Act → Reflect → Respond. Adding a WebSearchTool to test extensibility, the agent initially failed its first search, reflected on poor results, adapted its query, and then succeeded. This behavior wasn’t programmed; it emerged naturally from the architecture.
Five hours later, I integrated a FileManagerTool — it worked on the first try. Like code compiling first time, except this was intelligence composing zero-config.
Key insight: separating cognitive operations from tool orchestration enables true composability. Most frameworks conflate these, resulting in brittle, unpredictable agents.
Commit timeline: https://github.com/iteebz/cogency
It’s pip-installable (pip install cogency) with production-ready components. Currently dogfooding across projects.
Seeking feedback from the community on the approach and implementation.