danmcinerney/orchflows/evolve

Apply library context and required evaluation and state contracts. Accept artifacts, seeds or a creation brief; purpose and constraints; optional bounds, output location and scoped settings. Infer quality criteria; clarify gaps that prevent meaningful creation or assessment. Production follows core staffing rules and evaluation's context exclusions.

Start or resume

Use the caller's directory or a distinct evolve-runs/<run-id>/ in their workspace. Reconcile saved state and in-flight work before new work.

For a new run, preserve the original or create a seed from the brief. Design, calibrate and save evaluation before challengers. Evaluate seeds, choose the incumbent (current best), and save the harness: working instructions, tools and search policy.

Record bounds, scoped settings and per-experiment limits. Default to three rounds and one challenger per round. Explicit continuous requests remove the total round cap: continue until stopped, a supplied bound is reached or execution is blocked. A target stops work only if the caller says so; plateau is not completion.

Repeat

1. Start and choose. Record each artifact/harness attempt under core's iteration bounds and the state contract before proposal or production. Read checkpoint/evidence; choose a hypothesis and predicted benefit. When informative rounds stop yielding promotions, change approach, investigate the repeated failure or test a harness change.
2. Make. Save the plan and isolated candidate locations. Supply each challenger its parent snapshot, hypothesis, active harness, public evaluation and guidance. Give it one owner; exclude incumbent, evaluation and journal from production writes. A harness experiment replaces the ordinary round.
3. Compare. Freeze candidates. Apply screening, matched evaluation revisions, independent orchflows:orch-review judgments and confirmation. Compare every proposed replacement with the incumbent. Missing evidence, failed requirements, ties or unconfirmed wins retain the incumbent. Record failures without invented scores.
4. Record and continue. Journal decision/evidence, then checkpoint winner, alternatives, lessons and remaining bounds. Check stopping conditions before another round. Repair uninformative, inconsistent or exploitable evaluation between rounds under the evaluation contract.

Return or yield

Persist at each decision and before interruption/context rollover. Return best artifact, improvements/evaluation revision, active harness, evidence, observable resource use, actual stop reason and resume path. Separate measured, judge-preferred and untested claims. Missing execution/continuation capability requires a checkpoint and gap, not a background-execution claim. Reaching a finite bound completes the search without proving further improvement impossible.