gwt-context

Honest GWT Report

Status as of 2026-04-28: gwt-context is a practical GWT-inspired MCP memory runtime. It has more than retrieval plus a prompt template, but it is still not a full cognitive Global Workspace model.

What Is Real

• There is a bounded conscious workspace. Candidates must compete before they become globally visible.
• Workspace admission has ignition gating through GWT_MIN_ACTIVATION; weak candidates are not admitted only because a slot is empty.
• Broadcast is now an event, not only a rendered text response. After each broadcast, SelectionBroadcastCycle publishes the same content to a BroadcastBus.
• Independent subscribers read the broadcast and propose actions. Current local subscribers cover structured resolution, semantic recall, relation continuation, contradiction flags, and follow-up critique.
• Accepted proposals can affect runtime behavior. resolve_answer updates the deterministic evidence plan, query_memory admits new candidates through public ports, and conflict/follow-up proposals are recorded as trace metadata.
• The bus records proposals, accepted actions, inhibited repeats, subscriber reports, timeout/error status, and arbitration reason codes.
• Conscious records can reactivate explicit linked_ids back into the preconscious buffer on the next cycle, which gives the runtime a concrete reentry path that does not parse broadcast text.
• External agent loops have a port-safe adapter path through ExternalReasoningSubscriber; provider SDKs stay outside application.

What Is Still GWT-Inspired, Not Full GWT

• Most built-in subscribers are deterministic local processors, not separate long-running agent processes with their own memory and tool loops.
• Arbitration is explicit and inspectable, but it is not learned. Priority, thresholds, deduplication, and policy rules are engineered.
• The runtime has short recurrent cycles, not open-ended cognitive dynamics. Multi-pass attention is opt-in through gwt_attend(passes=...).
• Broadcast makes content available to processors inside this runtime. It does not make content globally available to every subsystem in a larger host agent unless that host wires those subsystems as subscribers.
• Current benchmark gains mostly prove controlled exact selection, bus health, and no regression. They do not prove universal long-context reasoning gains.

Best Current Claim

The honest claim is:

gwt-context implements a bounded working-memory runtime where facts compete for global availability, broadcasts are consumed by independent proposal processors, and accepted proposals can drive the next memory actions through public MCP/application ports.

The weaker claim to avoid is:

This is a complete Global Workspace Theory implementation for LLM agents.

Design Implication

The next architectural frontier is processor independence. The runtime already has the bus boundary, proposal contracts, circuit breakers, budgets, traces, and external subscriber adapter. To become more GWT-like, more reasoning must move out of a single controller call and into independent subscriber loops that read the same broadcast, maintain their own local state, and compete through the bus.