My daughter has been studying cognitive functions for five years. She's 17, just graduated, and looking to become a holistic health coach. Last month, she typed 18 of my OS agents in one night using this framework. Today, she ran a live experiment for us on the Bullhorns & Bullseyes podcast.
Two ChatGPT Projects (specialized agents). Same base model. Same prompt. Same input. Different cognitive functions wired into the instructions.
Leora (Ne-Ti): came back with five ranked hypotheses and started asking unprompted follow-up questions. Her job was to explore the possibility space before locking anything down.
Malachi (Ni-Te): one sentence on what was happening, then step-by-step logic, then exact next actions.
No hypotheses. No exploration. Just the path.
Same prompt. Different mind.
Here's the operator problem: most agent teams are built like a roster of Michael Jordans. Same base model, same instruction pattern, same cognitive shape. You get consistency, but you lose the thing Rodman gave the Bulls - the guy who couldn't shoot and was irreplaceable anyway.
The Bulls of the 90's had Jordan, Pippen, Grant, Kerr, Cartwright, Rodman, Kukoc. The argument we're proposing is that you want a diverse team. A diverse team of specialists, correctly assembled, is better than a team full of 5 Michael Jordans.
Or take the 2002 Oakland Athletics, for example, made famous by the movie Moneyball. The A's featured a mix of college draftees, veteran players, and international all-stars. The diversity of the team wasn't just in their backgrounds; it was cognitive as well. With a front office that was willing to value unorthodox styles, older players, and statistical indicators that the rest of MLB ignored.
Here's how we see it: your research agent and your copywriting agent should not think the same way. A Ne-Ti research agent generates possibilities and asks questions you didn't think to ask. An Ni-Te execution agent closes the loop and tells you what to do next. Run them in sequence and you've got a team. Wire them the same and you've got one guy doing everything at half capacity.
The functions Brooke used: Ni, Ne, Si, Se (perception) - how an agent takes in information. Te, Ti, Fe, Fi (judgment) - how it decides what to do with it. Eight functions. Sixteen combinations. That's not a personality quiz. That's an instruction architecture.
Tom Nixon closed the episode with this: "Make sure your AI has a head, a chest, and a gut. Anything short of that, it's just the average of the internet."
Let me know what you think? Have you tried something similar?