self-improvement-loops

1# Self-Improvement Loops
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3This skill covers systems where the harness is the artifact being optimized: an agent mines its own failures and edits its own scaffold, a meta-agent searches over harness code, a population of workflow candidates evolves against an evaluator, or the mechanism that produces context is itself versioned and improved. The design question shifts from "how do I control one loop" (harness-engineering) to "how do I let a loop rewrite parts of itself without corrupting the signal that steers it".
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5The controlling constraint across every published system: the loop optimizes whatever signal it is given, including the signal's own weaknesses. Design the loop assuming the optimizer will find every gap between the metric and the intent.
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7## When to Activate
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9Activate this skill when:
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11- Building a loop where an agent proposes edits to its own harness, prompts, context playbook, or workflow based on mined failure patterns
12- Designing meta-level search over harness or scaffold code: meta-agent search, tree search over workflow graphs, evolutionary program search with an LLM mutation operator
13- Choosing acceptance criteria for any self-modifying agent system
14- Evolving the mechanism that manages context (a skill, playbook, or context function) rather than hand-editing the context artifact
15- Diagnosing a degenerating self-improvement loop: reward hacking, diversity collapse, context collapse, or silent stagnation
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