kalarislabs/research-agent-skills/evolving-ai-agents
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Provides guidance for automatically evolving and optimizing AI agents across any domain using LLM-driven evolution algorithms. Use when building self-improving agents, optimizing agent prompts and skills against benchmarks, or implementing automated agent evaluation loops.
Install
npx vskill@latest install kalarislabs/research-agent-skills/evolving-ai-agentsSKILL.md
Evolving AI Agents with A-Evolve
Overview
A-Evolve is universal infrastructure for evolving any AI agent across any domain using any evolution algorithm with zero manual engineering. It represents all evolvable agent state as files (prompts, skills, memory, tools), runs iterative solve-observe-evolve cycles against benchmarks, and uses LLM-driven mutation to improve agent performance automatically.
Benchmark results (Claude Opus 4.6):
- MCP-Atlas: 79.4% (#1)
- SWE-bench Verified: 76.8% (~#5)
- Terminal-Bench 2.0: 76.5% (~#7)
- SkillsBench: 34.9% (#2)
When to Use A-Evolve
Use A-Evolve when:
- Optimizing agent prompts, skills, or memory against a measurable benchmark
- Building self-improving agents with automated gating and rollback
- Evolving domain-specific tool usage and procedures through LLM-driven mutation
- Running iterative solve-observe-evolve loops to maximize agent performance
- Needing reproducible, git-versioned evolution history for every change
Key differentiator: Other frameworks _build_ agents; A-Evolve _optimizes_ them. It sits on top of any agent framework and makes it better through automated evolution.
Do NOT use A-Evolve for:
- Building multi-agent orchestration from scratch (use CrewAI, LangGraph)
- One-shot agent tasks with no iteration needed (use LangChain, LlamaIndex)
- RAG pipeline optimization (use LlamaIndex, Chroma)
- Prompt-only optimization without skill/memory evolution (use DSPy)
Quick Start
Installation
Three-Line Evolution
This copies the built-in SWE seed workspace, runs 10 evolution cycles against SWE-bench Verified, and returns the optimized agent.
Core Concepts
The Agent Workspace
All evolvable state lives as files in a workspace directory:
The Evolution Loop
Each cycle follows five phases:
- Solve — Agent processes a batch of tasks from the benchmark
- Observe — Benchmark evaluates trajectories, producing (task, trajectory, feedback) triples
- Evolve — Evolution engine mutates workspace files based on observations
- Gate — Validate mutations (git snapshot before/after for rollback)
- Reload — Agent reinitializes from evolved filesystem state
Three Pluggable Interfaces
Workflow 1: Evolve an Existing Agent
Use when: You have a working agent and want to optimize it against a benchmark.
Critical Requirements:
- [ ] Agent implements
BaseAgent.solve()returningTrajectory - [ ] Benchmark implements
BenchmarkAdapterwithget_tasks()andevaluate() - [ ] Seed workspace has
manifest.yamlwith entrypoint and evolvable layers - [ ] System prompt exists at
prompts/system.md - [ ] Workspace is a git repo (run
git init && git add -A && git commit -m "init")
Steps
Post-Evolution
The workspace is now optimized. Inspect what changed:
Workflow 2: Add a Custom Benchmark
Use when: You want to evolve agents on your own domain-specific tasks.
Critical Requirements:
- [ ] Define task format (inputs, expected outputs)
- [ ] Implement scoring logic (0.0–1.0 scale)
- [ ] Prepare task dataset (train + holdout split)
Steps
Workflow 3: Create a Custom Evolution Engine
Use when: The default LLM-driven mutation doesn't suit your domain.
Steps
Built-in Components
Seed Agents
| Agent | Domain | Model | Key Feature | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
swe | SWE-bench | Claude Opus 4.6 | Verify-fix loop, skill proposals | |
terminal | Terminal-Bench | Claude Sonnet 4 | Concurrent timeout, env discovery | |
mcp | MCP-Atlas | Claude Opus 4.6 | MCP server integration |
Benchmarks
| Name | Domain | Metric | |
|---|---|---|---|
swe-verified | Code patching | Pass rate | |
mcp-atlas | Tool calling | Accuracy | |
terminal2 | Shell tasks | Pass rate | |
skill-bench | Multi-step procedures | Accuracy | |
arc-agi-3 | Interactive games | RHAE score |
Evolution Algorithms
| Algorithm | Strategy | Best For | |
|---|---|---|---|
| A-Evolve/SkillForge | LLM-driven workspace mutation | General-purpose | |
| Guided Synthesis | Memory-first, curated skills | Skill discovery | |
| Adaptive Evolution | Reward tracking, filtered observations | Fine-grained control | |
| Adaptive Skill | Skill-centric refinement | Skill-heavy domains |
Configuration Reference
Convergence: Evolution stops early when score improvement is less than egl_threshold over the last egl_window cycles.
Skill Format
Skills are reusable procedures discovered and refined during evolution:
Skills accumulate in the workspace skills/ directory. The evolver curates them: ACCEPT new skills, MERGE overlapping ones, SKIP redundant proposals. Target: 5–10 broad skills, not 30 narrow ones.
Common Issues
Evolution score plateaus early
Cause: Batch size too small or evolver doesn't see enough failure diversity. Fix: Increase batch_size (try 15–20) and ensure benchmark tasks cover diverse failure modes. Set trajectory_only=False so the evolver sees scores.
Agent workspace grows too large
Cause: Skill library bloat from accepting every proposal. Fix: The default SkillForge engine curates skills automatically. If using a custom engine, implement merging logic to consolidate overlapping skills.
Git conflicts during evolution
Cause: Multiple evolution runs on the same workspace. Fix: Each evolver.run() should operate on its own workspace copy. Use Evolver(agent="seed-name") to auto-copy the seed each time.
LLM provider errors during evolution
Cause: Rate limits or authentication issues with the evolver model. Fix: Check evolver_model config. For Bedrock, ensure AWS credentials are configured. For Anthropic, set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.
Custom agent not picking up evolved state
Cause: Agent doesn't implement reload_from_fs(). Fix: Override reload_from_fs() in your BaseAgent subclass to re-read prompts, skills, and memory from the workspace after each evolution cycle.
Usage Instructions for Agents
When this skill is loaded:
This is the start of the file. Read the full SKILL.md on GitHub.
Security
- Security scanPassed, 100 of 100Pattern checks on the skill's files.
- Model reviewNot runA model review is scheduled for the next rescan.
Quality evaluation
- Task evaluationNot runNo evaluation yet. Run one in Skill Studio.
Source
- SKILL.md in the repositoryCheckingskills/evolving-ai-agents/SKILL.md
Popularity
- Repository stars
- 8
- 7-day trend score
- 16
Stars and forks are for the whole GitHub repository, not this skill alone. Not refreshed yet.
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