Concepts

From the outside, Cogno is simple: the work you’re already doing turns into finished tasks. Underneath, a small set of parts hand that work down a single loop. Learn these five and the rest of the docs — and the app itself — fall into place.

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The loop, in one line

Events flow in → the cogno-engine makes sense of them → the cogno-agent proposes the work → workers do it → the result comes back to you as a GitHub pull request. Integrations are what feed the start of that loop and where the finished work lands. Everything below is just those five parts in more detail.

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Events

Events are the raw material Cogno works from — a single piece of activity from somewhere you already work: a message in a Slack channel, a comment on a GitHub pull request, something said in a meeting. You don’t file events. They arrive on their own as you and your team go about your normal day, and they’re what lets Cogno work from what’s already happening instead of waiting on you to write a ticket.

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The cogno-engine

The cogno-engine is Cogno’s cognitive engine: the always-on intelligence, running in Cogno’s cloud, that turns a stream of raw events into an understanding of what’s going on. It does three things:

• Makes sense of events — it reads the messages, meetings, and code activity flowing in and works out what actually matters, filtering noise from signal.
• Builds working memory — it maintains a durable picture of your workspace — projects, decisions, who’s doing what — that persists across events rather than reacting to each one in isolation.
• Feeds the agent — that memory and understanding is the context the cogno-agent draws on to decide what to do next.

Think of the cogno-engine as the part that understands. It doesn’t create tasks itself — it builds the picture that lets the cogno-agent create good ones.

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The cogno-agent

The cogno-agent is Cogno’s cloud agent. Backed by the cogno-engine’s memory and your existing tasks, it decides what needs to happen and proposes tasks — no one has to write the ticket.

• It runs in Cogno’s cloud, always on, independent of your machine.
• It reads the cogno-engine’s understanding of the workspace, plus the tasks already in flight.
• It creates tasks and places them in the Suggested lane of a status, each with a short reason — you glance, then accept or dismiss. See Work with Tasks for how the lane works.

Where the cogno-engine understands, the cogno-agent decides and proposes. It’s the difference between knowing what’s going on and turning that into concrete work.

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Workers

A worker is Cogno’s execution layer — the piece that actually does the work. Workers run on your machine (installed with the desktop app), not in the cloud.

• A worker picks up a task and runs a coding agent — Claude Code or Codex — to implement it.
• It reports a heartbeat so you can see it’s online in Worker Hub; go quiet and it shows as stale, then offline.
• When it’s done, it delivers the result as a GitHub pull request you review and merge.

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Two kinds of integrations

Integrations connect Cogno to the tools you already use. They come in two kinds, matching the two ends of the loop: Most integrations are sources: they feed the start of the loop. GitHub is the main action — it’s where the work comes back to you. Some connectors do both (GitHub syncs issues and receives PRs).

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Related docs

• What is Cogno? — the idea behind the loop.
• Getting started with Cogno — set up the loop end to end.
• Connect integrations — bring in your sources and actions.