Improvement log

Append one line per observation. Don't fix anything — just record it.

Format: - CATEGORY: path/or/subject: observation

Use a short uppercase category prefix that names why the item belongs in the log, such as ABSTRACTION, SYNTHESIS, DUPLICATION, CONTRADICTION, or FIX. Use a file path when one artifact is the clear target; otherwise use a bracketed subject list.

  • ABSTRACTION: [agents-md-should-be-organized-as-a-control-plane, context-engineering, why-ai-systems-dont-learn-and-what-to-do-about-it source] share unnamed structure: control-plane abstractions recur at repository, prompt, and learning-architecture levels, but the transfer conditions between those levels are not yet named
  • SYNTHESIS: [three-space-agent-memory-maps-to-tulving-taxonomy (content-type axis), multi-agent-memory-computer-architecture-perspective source (hierarchy-level axis)] — two independent decompositions of agent memory from different traditions (cognitive science vs computer architecture) that together predict a two-axis taxonomy: content type x hierarchy level
  • SYNTHESIS: [superarc source (recursive compression), esolang-bench source (code generation OOD), pathway-sudoku source (constraint satisfaction), ebrahimi induction-bias source (state tracking)] — four sources now converge on "LLMs score near zero on well-specified problems that strip training-distribution shortcuts"; SuperARC adds a fourth independent domain with the strongest methodology (AIT-grounded, mathematically proven equivalence between compression and prediction)
  • ABSTRACTION: [context-efficiency-is-the-central-design-concern-in-agent-systems.md, tool-loop-index.md, process-structure-and-output-structure-are-independent-levers.md, kb/agent-memory-systems/agentic-memory-systems-comparative-review.md] share an unnamed claim that filesystem-native tool use is a high-reach long-context strategy because it externalizes semantic overflow into executable process structure
  • SYNTHESIS: [Huxley-Godel Machine connect, diagnostic-richness/oracle-strength cluster]: outer-loop harness search may need archive-objective alignment in addition to oracle strength and diagnostic richness; HGM frames the model as oracle strength, diagnostic access quality, and archive-selection objective
  • SYNTHESIS: [externalization unified review connect, context-efficiency-is-the-central-design-concern-in-agent-systems.md, deploy-time-learning-is-the-missing-middle.md, agent-runtimes-decompose-into-scheduler-context-engine-and-execution.md, skills-derive-from-methodology-through-distillation.md]: externalization may reframe context engineering as cognitive burden relocation; the KB has the pieces but not this mechanism as a named frame
  • SYNTHESIS: [LLM memory connect, agent-memory-requirements/evaluate-memory-by-effects.md]: memory evaluation may have a ground-truth horizon, degrading from direct recall toward arc change, supersession, temporal correctness, and significance recognition
  • ABSTRACTION: [Stash connect, service-owned memory backends]: service-owned memory backends may need typed-role analysis by storage substrate, extraction schema, validation gate, activation mechanism, and typed operational objects
  • ABSTRACTION: [Stash connect, hypothesis records]: hypothesis records may be a distinct memory lifecycle; the Stash review captures hypothesis lifecycle as a borrowable idea, but the KB lacks a general workshop/library treatment
  • ABSTRACTION: [mark-semantics.md, stale-indexes-are-worse-than-no-indexes.md, status field on notes (unenforced trust mark), ADR 025 (retired denormalized indexes)] — candidate theory underneath mark semantics: derived assertions over recomputable ground truth share one shape (hint-vs-guarantee: false-absence costs a query, false-presence is silently unbounded, so assertions are enforced-or-omitted, and dropping one degrades to recomputation). Likely siblings outside the KB: caches and materialized views, gradual typing's hint/guarantee divide, checksums, freshness stamps. Second in-corpus instance found by connect (2026-06-10): keep-compiled-views-aligned.md states the compiled-view source-of-truth requirement the mark rule instantiates (edge now authored from mark-semantics). Needs more instances before naming — watch the next mark added to the type system, the unenforced status: maturity field (it earns trust without a validator — does it bite?), and external systems in agent-memory reviews carrying confidence/validation metadata
  • ABSTRACTION: [AGENTS.md python3 rule, ephemeral-computation-prevents-accumulation.md, spec-mining-as-codification.md] — agents run stdlib throwaway scripts as inline heredocs and discard them; a designated home for ephemeral helper code would create the accumulation substrate the ephemerality notes predict is lost (a recurring script is spec-mining input for a future commonplace-* command per progressive-constraining). Needs design before adopting: location (workshop-style scratch dir vs scripts/), committed vs gitignored, lifecycle/expiry so it stays a substrate rather than a junk drawer, and what recurrence signal trips promotion to a real command
  • ABSTRACTION: [cp-skill-write traits list, write-agent-memory-system-review contract reads, AGENTS.md.template x2, mark-semantics.md] — hot-path instructions need hardcoded copies of contract values for context economy (frontloading), but an unvalidated copy is an unenforced compiled view that drifts; the 2026-06-10 skill edits chose read-the-contract (paying a file load per invocation) when frontload-plus-drift-validator dominates both. Design sketch: machine-locatable frontloaded regions (a marker naming the source, like the old generated-tail marker but commit-time-checked), a derivation rule per region (extractable lists are checkable; prose summaries are not), and a validator that re-derives, compares, and names the fix. Trivial first case: the two tracked AGENTS.md.template copies must be identical. Third and fourth instances of the derived-assertions-over-recomputable-ground-truth candidate theory
  • SYNTHESIS: [external inquiring-line "How can agents distinguish over-generalized lessons from genuinely useful long-tail knowledge?" (inquiringlines.com), an-accepted-edit-verifies-the-change-not-the-rule.md, trace-extracted-memory-earns-authority-per-operation-not-at-capture.md, first-principles-reasoning-selects-for-explanatory-reach-over.md] — external note poses the abstract-vs-preserve question (when should an agent generalize a stored experience into a broad lesson vs preserve a rare fact verbatim) but assembles five mechanisms (SkillRL, Reflexion, feedback decomposition, process verification, VOYAGER) without resolving it; our KB already supplies the discriminator as the verify→distill rung transition — a success is instance-verified and replayable verbatim, a lesson abstracted from a failure is a rule that has not earned rule-level authority and must be re-verified, and "boundaries of where the rule holds" is the reach property re-verification establishes. Connect found one genuine gap: process verification / process reward (the 32%→87% bullet) has no notes-level home, only kb/sources/ survey ingests — candidate for a future note under the verify rung. Workshop closed without promotion (synthesis already distributed across the three notes)
  • FIX: [ADR 030 batch endpoints, Claude Code dynamic workflows] — first harness-orchestrated review run executed end-to-end (2026-06-12): selector -> two prepared batches -> workflow with one reviewer agent per batch (parallel, ~52s) -> ingest; 4 (note, gate) pairs recorded, zero Python changes needed. Frictions observed: workflow args input did not reach the script (inlined data as workaround); deterministic endpoints must run in the parent conversation because the script sandbox has no shell (an in-script sweep loop is impossible — parent interleaves rounds); no token telemetry lands on the runs (harness reports usage per workflow, not per run; ingest accepts none); the recorded model partition is the orchestrator's unverified assertion. The agent({schema}) option means the structured-output-codec proposal's trigger is now arguably met for the workflow medium
  • FIX: [kb/sources, self-improving-systems cluster] — four literature citations added from model memory, pending proper snapshot+ingest (session egress policy blocked arxiv.org, dl.acm.org, and university hosts): Zinkevich, "Online Convex Programming and Generalized Infinitesimal Gradient Ascent" (ICML 2003); Ailon, Chazelle, Clarkson, Liu, Mulzer, Seshadhri, "Self-Improving Algorithms" (SICOMP 2011, arXiv:0907.0884); Weyns, "Software Engineering of Self-Adaptive Systems: An Organised Tour and Future Challenges" (Handbook of Software Engineering, 2019); Petrovska, Erjiage, Kugele, "Defining Self-adaptive Systems: A Systematic Literature Review" (arXiv:2505.17798). When on a network-open system, run cp-skill-snapshot-web + cp-skill-ingest for each and repoint the inline citations in kb/notes/definitions/self-improving-system.md and kb/notes/a-proposal-selection-loop-requires-search-evaluation-and-retention.md from external URLs to the local ingests
  • FIX: [kb/reference/proposals/, ADR 056, kb/reference/types/adr.md] — proposal disposal was unspecified: ADR 028 named the adoption transition but no disposal operation, so eight July 2026 decisions split between six deletions (each with a properdocs.yml redirect to the adopting ADR — a convention invisible to rg over kb/ and to a shallow clone, which made the first audit undercount by five) and two ad-hoc retention banners. Resolved by archiving decided proposals to proposals/archive/ as a link sink, with extraction obligatory before the move, re-extraction rather than an inbound link as the repair, and provenance demoted from link to title mention; ADRs from 2026-07-25 must carry ## Considered alternatives to absorb what the demoted pointer used to reach. Two observations worth watching: the alternatives requirement could not be schema-enforced (4 of 56 ADRs carry alternatives prose, none as a heading, so a required heading fails the corpus at fail-by-default severity), so it follows the operativity-path precedent as dated prose; and the archive boundary — no links into archive/ except from archive/ and kb/work/ — would be the KB's first fully mechanical lifecycle rule if the check is ever built. Discussion summary in kb/work/lifecycle-management/lifecycle-model.md
  • ABSTRACTION: [oracle-strength-spectrum.md, weakly-discriminated-qualities-tend-to-be-underselected.md, reflection-buys-addressability.md, accumulation-counts-dependence-through-the-retained-result.md, self-improvement-is-relative-to-a-declared-objective.md] — the cluster's profile dimensions (addressability, cumulativity, reflective coverage, computational autonomy) look like objectives but are proximate targets: proxies adopted because the improvement objective is not measurable at the moment of decision. Nobody wants coverage; they want the artifacts to get better, and coverage is held to serve that. The KB already theorizes proxy-ness for checks — oracle-strength-spectrum names oracle strength as "the gradient underlying the exact-spec/proxy-theory distinction", and weakly-discriminated-qualities gives the failure mode (weakly discriminated qualities lose to strongly verified ones) — but only for things that yield a verdict. A structural property adopted as a target has no oracle at all: "all tests pass" is checked, "stay addressable" is not. That is the gap. Two consequences already visible. (1) It narrows the objective-revision open question in self-improvement-is-relative-to-a-declared-objective.md: revising a proximate target is settled by the objective it stands in for — does the new gate track artifact quality better? — an ordinary empirical question with no meta-criterion, so the regress bites only on endogenous revision of the objective itself. (2) It makes the dimensions-as-goals move contestable rather than licensed: whether coverage serves artifact quality is a claim that can be false. Live exposure in this repo: if artifact quality is weakly discriminated by the actual gate while structural validity and link health are strongly verified, the strongly-verified properties win regardless of intent. Route not taken: a second "adaptation goal" objective level borrowed from the self-adaptive-systems domain-goal/adaptation-goal split (Petrovska et al.), deflated because those goals are instrumental to the objective rather than a second objective — the salvage from the profile note's Petrovska paragraph, which is otherwise redundant and pending deletion. Before naming, settle what makes a structural property a good proxy and how you would discover it was not; and note that "proximate target" would read as a near-synonym of "oracle" unless the check-versus-property daylight is stated.
  • FIX: [Ma et al. prompt-stability citations] — five notes cite the arXiv URL directly although kb/sources/ has held the snapshot and ingest since 2026-03; repo-wide decision needed on repointing inline external citations to local captures (surfaced by the llm-output-deviation connect pass)
  • FIX: [constraining cluster, llm-output-deviation-has-three-sources-with-non-substitutable.md] — four notes still cite the two-phenomena model (agentic-systems-interpret-underspecified-instructions) as their deviation foundation; none cites the three-source synthesis that supersedes it as taxonomy
  • CONTRADICTION: [llm-code-boundaries-are-natural-checkpoints.md, llm-output-deviation-has-three-sources-with-non-substitutable.md] — checkpoint note claims both LLM-side properties collapse at an LLM→code crossing, but under the three-object model interpretation error crosses intact: a wrong-but-well-typed value passes the boundary, the very case the note's own debugging advice depends on catching