Design interactive behavior as a graph, right inside your patch. Draw states, connect them with frame-timed transitions, and drop regions that broadcast when they're active — then wire it all into your visuals. Trigger transitions from anything in the patch, watch the active state, frame count, and transition countdown update live, and drive particles, scenes, or UI from a state machine you can actually see. No spaghetti, no guesswork — just a clean, node-based brain for your project.

there is a very old video, showing how Automata works. It shows the vvvv version but the basic principles apply to the cables version as well. So as long there is no proper cables video, refer to this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8CmERSoyPc&t=13s