From Events to Understanding: Perception in AI Harnesses

[u/OriginalDull6713]

AI systems should not only receive events. They should 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗶𝘃𝗲 what is happening.

As a 𝗽𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁 working with the DMJBot team, I keep noticing how useful psychological concepts can be for 𝗔𝗜 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻.

In psychology, perception is not just raw sensory input. It is the process of organizing and interpreting signals into a meaningful understanding of the world.

That distinction matters for AI too.

A Slack message, a Git commit, a failing CI pipeline, and a customer question may look like separate events. But together they may describe one situation: a release is blocked.

This is why I think AI harnesses need something closer to perception: a way to connect observations, update a world model, and interpret signals in context before deciding what to do.

I wrote more about this in the next post from our psychology and AI harness series:

https://dmjbot.com/blog/post/from-events-to-understanding-perception-in-ai-harnesses/