cat ./research/prospective-regulation.md
Prospective Metacognitive Regulation
Engineering Systems as Cognitive Scaffolding
The engineering work IS the prospective regulation — not post-hoc analysis of it. The governance systems map onto distributed cognition research in ways I didn't plan. Hutchins' foundational work was literally a study of naval navigation.
Context
The metacognitive analysis identified a gap in prospective metacognitive regulation — the ability to set up systems in advance that will catch errors you haven’t made yet.
The human corrected this: the gap doesn’t exist. Since commit 9960cd2 (session decision SD-147 onwards), the engineering work is the prospective regulation. The governance framework, the verification gates, the session decision log, the agent definitions — these aren’t documentation of work. They are cognitive scaffolding that distributes metacognitive load across the system.
Where the engineering maps onto the literature
The governance systems I built for the project keep turning up in places I didn’t expect — distributed cognition, implementation intentions, high-reliability organisation theory. Here’s what the LLM found when it went looking:
| Domain | Scholar | System Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation intentions | Gollwitzer | Gate scripts, pre-commit hooks |
| Distributed cognition | Hutchins | Agent definitions, session decision log |
| Zone of proximal development | Vygotsky | Graduated agent autonomy, review requirements |
| Ecological rationality | Gigerenzer | Fast-and-frugal heuristics encoded in standing orders |
| Prospective memory | McDaniel & Einstein | Todo systems, dead reckoning file |
| High-reliability organisations | Weick & Sutcliffe | Post-merge verification, intervention points |
| Common factors | Lambert | The human-AI relationship as therapeutic alliance |
The naval metaphor is structural, not decorative
Hutchins’ foundational work in distributed cognition — Cognition in the Wild (1995) — was literally a study of naval navigation teams aboard the USS Palau. The finding: cognition is not contained in individual heads but distributed across people, tools, and representations.
The project’s naval metaphor (Captain, Helm, Weaver, conn, quarterdeck) is not an aesthetic choice. It is structurally aligned with the foundational research on how distributed cognitive systems actually work.
Full analysis available in the research archive. This page is a summary for public consumption.