Cognitive bus
The Kafka event fabric treated as the temporal coordination layer for asynchronous cognition. All cognitive subsystems communicate via typed Kafka topics rather than direct in-process calls.
Treating Kafka as a cognitive bus rather than a simple message queue is an architectural stance with significant consequences. Direct in-process calls between subsystems create tight coupling: the caller must know the callee's interface, both must be available simultaneously, and failures in one propagate directly to the other. The cognitive bus inverts this: subsystems publish typed events to topics and consume from topics, knowing nothing about who else is reading or writing. The consolidation worker does not call the reinforcement engine directly - it publishes a consolidation.completed event that the reinforcement engine consumes at its own pace. This decoupling means each subsystem can scale, fail, restart, and be replaced independently. The Kafka topic namespace is organized semantically: telemetry.* for raw infrastructure signals, cognition.* for processed operational intelligence, memory.* for memory lifecycle events, and selfmod.* for self-modification proposals and outcomes. This structure makes the data flow readable from the topic names alone.