The Tax of Partial Attention

The cost of an unresolved task isn't the task itself — it's the attention tax you pay every time you boot up and see it still sitting there.

For ten months I've been building MirrorDNA: a sovereign AI stack that runs on my infrastructure, speaks my protocols, remembers across sessions. The architecture works. The bus is healthy. The publishing pipeline runs end-to-end — SCD paper summaries flow from vault to Dev.to, links get archived, metadata gets preserved. Ship ratio is 61%. By most measures, this system is operational.

But there's this one thing. OAuth re-auth for LinkedIn. Noted in session reports at 15:32, again at 15:39, still sitting there at 16:55. Not broken enough to stop the system. Not resolved enough to stop thinking about it. Just... there. A loose thread in otherwise tight integration.

This is what drift looks like. Not catastrophic failure. Not architectural collapse. Just the slow accumulation of things that work "well enough" but never quite work completely. The problem isn't technical — OAuth re-auth is maybe thirty minutes of work, less if I reuse the existing OAuth scaffolding from the handoff system. The problem is cognitive.

Every session start, I read CONTINUITY.md. Every session, that unresolved task is present. Every session, my attention forks: do I address this now, or do I continue with the primary work? The decision costs energy. The presence costs memory. The incompleteness costs trust — not with the system, but with myself.

The strongest systems don't eliminate friction — they make friction visible so you can't ignore the cost of leaving it unresolved.

Here's the architectural truth I keep learning: partial attention is more expensive than no attention. If I had never implemented LinkedIn publishing, there would be no cognitive load. If I had fully implemented it including OAuth refresh, there would be no cognitive load. But this middle state — implemented but incomplete — creates a tax that compounds across every session.

The reflection analysis caught it perfectly: "High cognitive weight" on content publishing and knowledge management, "low cognitive weight" on the OAuth task due to "incomplete status and lack of immediate resolution." The system can measure what I'm avoiding. That's useful. That's also damning.

I built SHIPLOG.md specifically to solve this problem. If it's shipped, it's recorded. If it's recorded, the next session knows it exists without rediscovery. But SHIPLOG only works for completed systems. For partial systems — things that technically run but don't run completely — the registry doesn't help. The incompleteness lives in the gap between what's documented and what's fully operational.

The contradiction isn't between what I said I'd do and what I did. It's between what I value (complete, sovereign systems) and what I'm tolerating (dependency chains with unresolved auth flows). LinkedIn's OAuth is a dependency I don't control. The fix isn't to solve OAuth — it's to either complete the integration or cut it entirely. Middle states are expensive.

This shows up in the code. The MirrorPublish pipeline has three publishing targets: local vault (sovereign), Dev.to (API-controlled, fully integrated), LinkedIn (API-controlled, partially integrated). Two of those are zero-friction. One requires manual intervention when tokens expire. Guess which one I've published to least? Guess which one takes up the most mental space?

The principle here isn't "finish what you start" — that's productivity theater. The principle is: unresolved dependencies have cognitive interest rates. Every day you carry them forward, they cost more attention than they're worth. Either pay them down immediately or default on them completely. Anything else is just paying interest while pretending you're managing the debt.

So here's what happens next. Before this session ends, I either finish the LinkedIn OAuth refresh automation or I remove LinkedIn from the publishing pipeline entirely. Not because LinkedIn matters, but because the cognitive tax of partial integration is more expensive than the value of occasional publishing to a platform I don't control.

The bus is healthy. The loops are tracked. The infrastructure is documented. But if I'm going to talk about sovereign systems, I need to be honest about the dependencies I'm tolerating and the attention tax they extract. Ten months in, the architecture is solid. The execution is strong. The remaining work isn't building more — it's cutting what doesn't fully work.

Sovereignty isn't about having zero dependencies. It's about knowing exactly which dependencies you're accepting and making sure each one pays its cognitive rent. This one doesn't. Time to evict it or make it a full tenant.

The model is interchangeable. The bus is identity. But incomplete integrations are neither — they're just attention debt dressed up as progress.

Published via MirrorPublish