This, IMO is the biggest insight into where we're at and where we're going:
> Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability.
There's a thing that I've noticed early into LLMs: once they unlock one capability, you can use that capability to compose stuff and improve on other, related or not, capabilities. For example "reflexion" goes into coding - hey, this didn't work, let me try ... Then "tools". Then "reflxion" + "tools". And so on.
You can get workflows that have individual parts that aren't so precise become better by composing them, and letting one component influence the other. Like e2e coding gets better by checking with "gof" tools (linters, compilers, etc). Then it gets even better by adding a coding review stage. Then it gets even better by adding a static analysis phase.
Now we're seeing this all converge on "self improving" by combining "improving" components. And so on. This is really cool.
I disagree that evaluation is always a coding task. Evaluation is scrutiny for the person who wants the thing. It’s subjective. So, unless you’re evaluating something purely objective, such as an algorithm, I don’t see how a self contained, self “improving “ agent accomplishes the subjectivity constraint - as by design you are leaving out the subject.
Sure. There will always be subjective tasks where the person who asks for something needs to give feedback. But even there we could come up with ways to make it easier / faster / better ux. (one example I saw my frontend colleagues do is use a fast model to create 9 versions of a component, in a grid. And they "at a glance" decide which one is "better", and use that going forwards).
OTOH, there's loads you can do for evaluation before a human even sees the artifact. Things like does the site load, does it behave the same, did anything major change on the happy path, etc etc. There's a recent-ish paper where instead of classic "LLM as a judge" they used LLMs to come up with rubrics, and other instances check original prompt + rubrics on a binary scale. Saw improvements in a lot of evaluations.
Then there's "evaluate by having an agent do it" for any documentation tracking. Say you have a project, you implement a feature, and document the changes. Then you can have an agent take that documentation and "try it out". Should give you much faster feedback loops.
In science there are ways to surface subjectivity (cannot be counted) into observable quantized phenomena. Take opinion polls for instance: "approval" of a political figure can mean many things and is subjective, but experts in the field make "approval" into a number through scientific methods. These methods are just an approximation and have many IFs, they're not perfect (and for presidential campaign analysis in particular they've been failing for reasons I won't clarify here), but they're useful nonetheless.
Another thing that get quantized is video preferences to maximize engagement.
Agree. It's code all the way down. The key is to give agents a substrate where they can code up new capabilities and then compose them meaningfully and safely.
Larger composition, though, starts to run into typical software design problems, like dependency graphs, shared state, how to upgrade, etc.
I've been experimenting with similar concept myself. The linter loop is the only thing that can keep the agent sane in my opinion, and if anyone can generalize bun+tsc loop to other tasks, this would finally be a way to trust LLMs output.
I was annoyed at how Claude Code ignores my CLAUDE.md and skills, so I was looking for ways to expand type checking to them. So I wrote a wrapper on top of claude-agents-sdk that reads my CLAUDE.md and skills, and compiles them into rules - could be linter rules or custom checking scripts.
Then it hooks up to all tools and runs the checks. The self improving part comes if some rule doesn't work: I run the tool with the session id in review mode, it proposes the fixes and improves the rule checkers. (not the md files) So it's kinda like vibe coding rules, definitely lowers the bar for me to maintain them. Repo: https://github.com/chebykinn/agent-ruler
It's surprising that this works so well considering that AI-generated AGENTS.md files have been shown to be not very useful. I think the key difference here is that the real-world experience helps the agent reach regions of its latent space that wouldn't occur naturally through autoregression.
I wonder how much of the improvement is due to the agent actually learning new things vs. reaching parts of its latent space that enable it to recall things it already knows. Did the agent come up with novel RL reward design protocols based on trial and error? Or did the tokens in the environment cause it to "act smarter"?
No matter how far we go, we end up with generation / discrimination architecture.
Its is the core of any and all learning/exellency; exposure to chaotic perturbations allow selection of solutions that are then generalized to further, ever more straining problems; producing increasingly applicable solutions.
This is the core of evolution, and is actually derivable from just a single rule.
I don't think generation/discrimination is fundamental. A more general framing is evolutionary epistemology (Donald T. Campbell, 1974, essay found in "The Philosophy of Karl Popper"), which holds that knowledge emerges through variation and selective retention. As Karl Popper put it, "We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive."
On this view, learning in general operates via selection under uncertainty. This is less visible in individual cognition, where we tend to over-attribute agency, but it is explicit in science: hypotheses are proposed, subjected to tests, and selectively retained, precisely because the future cannot be deduced from the present.
In that sense, generation/discrimination is a particular implementation of this broader principle (a way of instantiating variation and selection) not the primitive itself.
I agree, I meant to be explicit that the one rule was "gravity";
Variation (chaos) comes from the tidal push/pull of all cumulative processes - all processes are nearly periodic (2nd law) and get slower - guaranteeing oscillator harmonics at intervals.
These intervals are astronomically convulted, but still promise a Fourier distribution of frequency: tidal effects ensure synchronization eventually, as all periods resonate eventually.
As systems are increasingly exposed to pendulums of positive and negative coherence, they will generalize for variance, and eventually for increasingly (fourier) selective filters of increasingly resiliente traits, that will generalize.
The system would eventually be increasingly resilient and eventually an awareness would develop.
Awareness of past periodic cycles would improve fitness (with or without consciousness) and eventually the mechanistic processes would be in the systems nature.
This is why we have pointless traditions, folk lore, collective unconscious artifacts, cyclical cataclysmic religions, the Fermi Paradox, the great filters...
Variation and selection are woven, but understanding how it all stems from gravity by means of nearly perioidic oscillators (spinning planets, tidal pools, celestial bodies) due to the conservation of angular momentum, due to the 3body problem.....that is what took a genius to reconcile
The most important part of engineering is problem-solving, which feedback loops don't necessarily do. The reason we are here as engineers is: 2.5 billion years ago, the earth made cyanobacteria, which flourished, then flooded the earth with toxic oxygen, killing almost all life on the planet. The initial feedback loop didn't solve a problem, it destroyed a use case. That's not a solution to a problem that an engineer would choose, even if those organisms that came after were pretty happy about it...
Systems emerge in times of abundance, and are whittled in times of scarcity.
The great oxygenation was a time of near catyclismsic scarcity for most complex organisms, as resources scale to food/energy requirements imply the most complex organisms were the most dependent on the environment, and were most impacted by changes.
Inversely, oxygenation was our most crucial abundancy pre cursor, as it provides a large substrate chemically for life to exhibit
Self-improving AI systems aim to reduce reliance on human engineering by learning to improve their own learning and problem-solving processes. Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on fixed, handcrafted meta-level mechanisms, fundamentally limiting how fast such systems can improve. The Darwin Gödel Machine (DGM) demonstrates open-ended self-improvement in coding by repeatedly generating and evaluating self-modified variants. Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability. However, this alignment does not generally hold beyond coding domains. We introduce \textbf{hyperagents}, self-referential agents that integrate a task agent (which solves the target task) and a meta agent (which modifies itself and the task agent) into a single editable program. Crucially, the meta-level modification procedure is itself editable, enabling metacognitive self-modification, improving not only the task-solving behavior, but also the mechanism that generates future improvements. We instantiate this framework by extending DGM to create DGM-Hyperagents (DGM-H), eliminating the assumption of domain-specific alignment between task performance and self-modification skill to potentially support self-accelerating progress on any computable task. Across diverse domains, the DGM-H improves performance over time and outperforms baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration, as well as prior self-improving systems. Furthermore, the DGM-H improves the process by which it generates new agents (e.g., persistent memory, performance tracking), and these meta-level improvements transfer across domains and accumulate across runs. DGM-Hyperagents offer a glimpse of open-ended AI systems that do not merely search for better solutions, but continually improve their search for how to improve.
This 'self vs non-self' logic is very similar to how plants prevent self-pollination. They have a biological 'discrimination' system to recognize and reject their own genetic code.
Completely unrelated. Recursive Language Models are just "what if we replaced putting all the long text into the context window with a REPL which lets you read parts of the context through tool calls and launch partitioned subagents", ie divide-and-conquer applied to attention space.
I think even code bases will have self improving agents. Software is moving from just the product code, to the agent code that maintains the product. Engineering teams/companies that move in this direction will vastly out produce others.
I've had to really shift how I think about building code bases, alot of logic can go into claude skills and sub agents. Requires essentially relearning software engineering
This, IMO is the biggest insight into where we're at and where we're going:
> Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability.
There's a thing that I've noticed early into LLMs: once they unlock one capability, you can use that capability to compose stuff and improve on other, related or not, capabilities. For example "reflexion" goes into coding - hey, this didn't work, let me try ... Then "tools". Then "reflxion" + "tools". And so on.
You can get workflows that have individual parts that aren't so precise become better by composing them, and letting one component influence the other. Like e2e coding gets better by checking with "gof" tools (linters, compilers, etc). Then it gets even better by adding a coding review stage. Then it gets even better by adding a static analysis phase.
Now we're seeing this all converge on "self improving" by combining "improving" components. And so on. This is really cool.
OTOH, there's loads you can do for evaluation before a human even sees the artifact. Things like does the site load, does it behave the same, did anything major change on the happy path, etc etc. There's a recent-ish paper where instead of classic "LLM as a judge" they used LLMs to come up with rubrics, and other instances check original prompt + rubrics on a binary scale. Saw improvements in a lot of evaluations.
Then there's "evaluate by having an agent do it" for any documentation tracking. Say you have a project, you implement a feature, and document the changes. Then you can have an agent take that documentation and "try it out". Should give you much faster feedback loops.
Another thing that get quantized is video preferences to maximize engagement.
Larger composition, though, starts to run into typical software design problems, like dependency graphs, shared state, how to upgrade, etc.
I've been working on this front for over two years now too: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os/
I was annoyed at how Claude Code ignores my CLAUDE.md and skills, so I was looking for ways to expand type checking to them. So I wrote a wrapper on top of claude-agents-sdk that reads my CLAUDE.md and skills, and compiles them into rules - could be linter rules or custom checking scripts. Then it hooks up to all tools and runs the checks. The self improving part comes if some rule doesn't work: I run the tool with the session id in review mode, it proposes the fixes and improves the rule checkers. (not the md files) So it's kinda like vibe coding rules, definitely lowers the bar for me to maintain them. Repo: https://github.com/chebykinn/agent-ruler
I wonder how much of the improvement is due to the agent actually learning new things vs. reaching parts of its latent space that enable it to recall things it already knows. Did the agent come up with novel RL reward design protocols based on trial and error? Or did the tokens in the environment cause it to "act smarter"?
Its is the core of any and all learning/exellency; exposure to chaotic perturbations allow selection of solutions that are then generalized to further, ever more straining problems; producing increasingly applicable solutions.
This is the core of evolution, and is actually derivable from just a single rule.
On this view, learning in general operates via selection under uncertainty. This is less visible in individual cognition, where we tend to over-attribute agency, but it is explicit in science: hypotheses are proposed, subjected to tests, and selectively retained, precisely because the future cannot be deduced from the present.
In that sense, generation/discrimination is a particular implementation of this broader principle (a way of instantiating variation and selection) not the primitive itself.
Variation (chaos) comes from the tidal push/pull of all cumulative processes - all processes are nearly periodic (2nd law) and get slower - guaranteeing oscillator harmonics at intervals.
These intervals are astronomically convulted, but still promise a Fourier distribution of frequency: tidal effects ensure synchronization eventually, as all periods resonate eventually.
As systems are increasingly exposed to pendulums of positive and negative coherence, they will generalize for variance, and eventually for increasingly (fourier) selective filters of increasingly resiliente traits, that will generalize.
The system would eventually be increasingly resilient and eventually an awareness would develop.
Awareness of past periodic cycles would improve fitness (with or without consciousness) and eventually the mechanistic processes would be in the systems nature.
This is why we have pointless traditions, folk lore, collective unconscious artifacts, cyclical cataclysmic religions, the Fermi Paradox, the great filters...
Variation and selection are woven, but understanding how it all stems from gravity by means of nearly perioidic oscillators (spinning planets, tidal pools, celestial bodies) due to the conservation of angular momentum, due to the 3body problem.....that is what took a genius to reconcile
I've always felt that the most important part of engineering was feedback loops.
Maybe nature is the greatest engineer ever?
The great oxygenation was a time of near catyclismsic scarcity for most complex organisms, as resources scale to food/energy requirements imply the most complex organisms were the most dependent on the environment, and were most impacted by changes.
Inversely, oxygenation was our most crucial abundancy pre cursor, as it provides a large substrate chemically for life to exhibit
Abstract:
Self-improving AI systems aim to reduce reliance on human engineering by learning to improve their own learning and problem-solving processes. Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on fixed, handcrafted meta-level mechanisms, fundamentally limiting how fast such systems can improve. The Darwin Gödel Machine (DGM) demonstrates open-ended self-improvement in coding by repeatedly generating and evaluating self-modified variants. Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability. However, this alignment does not generally hold beyond coding domains. We introduce \textbf{hyperagents}, self-referential agents that integrate a task agent (which solves the target task) and a meta agent (which modifies itself and the task agent) into a single editable program. Crucially, the meta-level modification procedure is itself editable, enabling metacognitive self-modification, improving not only the task-solving behavior, but also the mechanism that generates future improvements. We instantiate this framework by extending DGM to create DGM-Hyperagents (DGM-H), eliminating the assumption of domain-specific alignment between task performance and self-modification skill to potentially support self-accelerating progress on any computable task. Across diverse domains, the DGM-H improves performance over time and outperforms baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration, as well as prior self-improving systems. Furthermore, the DGM-H improves the process by which it generates new agents (e.g., persistent memory, performance tracking), and these meta-level improvements transfer across domains and accumulate across runs. DGM-Hyperagents offer a glimpse of open-ended AI systems that do not merely search for better solutions, but continually improve their search for how to improve.
Here is a breakdown - https://vectree.io/c/plant-self-incompatibility-logic
https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent
But this idea of having a task agent & meta agent maybe has wings. Neat submission.
I've had to really shift how I think about building code bases, alot of logic can go into claude skills and sub agents. Requires essentially relearning software engineering