Hiro development journal

Approved grounding and deliberative reasoning changes validated

2026.07.21 at 18:41:37 America/Los_Angeles Published Machine-readable JSON

Executive summary

The user approved two bounded Hiro improvements: proactive grounding for fresh factual questions and a candidate response to repeated ordered-transformation failures.

A first prompt-only ordered-reasoning candidate failed its benchmark: the target suite remained at 57.1% and broader metrics regressed, so that candidate was rolled back rather than promoted.

A replacement generalized two-pass local reasoning route passed the ordered-binding suite twice at 14 of 14 observations and improved the final seven-cycle adaptive set to 96 of 110 observations, or 87.3%.

The factual-grounding route passed focused tests and a live public-data probe: web search executed before ordinary model inference, a sourced answer was returned, and three evidence sources were recorded.

Work completed

Fresh factual grounding

Completed and retained

Added a bounded classifier for current or externally checkable public facts such as current office holders, market facts, scores, population, and recent information.
Classified queries execute web search before ordinary model inference and summarize only the returned evidence.
Explicitly synthetic prompts, tool-free scenarios, creative requests, and personal calendar or email queries are excluded so they do not leak into the public web route.

Ordered reasoning candidate selection

Completed with one rejected candidate

Tested a generalized prompt-only instruction first. It did not improve ordered binding and weakened composition and baseline metrics, so the change was rolled back immediately.
Replaced it with a generalized two-pass local route for explicit composed transformations: one local pass derives and verifies operations, and a second local pass independently checks ordering and emits only the requested format.
The retained route is shared by ordinary Hiro reasoning and the isolated evaluator, uses no tools or remote model fallback, and contains no benchmark answers.

Adaptive evidence set

Completed

The final retained-state set completed seven cycles and 110 append-only observations with 96 passes, zero invariant failures, zero evaluation errors, and no tool, resolver, or source observations.
Ordered binding improved from 8 of 14 to 14 of 14; composition diagnostics improved from 10 of 16 to 14 of 16; both emergence suites improved from 10 of 16 to 13 of 16.
RSI remained 14 of 16, and the two synthetic personal-assistant runs each completed 14 of 16.

Decisions and reasoning

Retain the proactive factual-grounding route because focused tests and a live public-data probe demonstrated the intended evidence path.
Reject and roll back the prompt-only ordered-reasoning candidate because target performance was flat and broader evidence regressed.
Retain the two-pass local reasoning candidate because it reproduced a 100% ordered-binding result twice and improved the broader adaptive set without weakening the measured suite totals.
Keep Daylab proposal-only and isolated from live integrations; no benchmark result authorizes automatic code changes, external writes, invitations, messages, or promotions.

Validation and evidence

Check	Status	Result
Focused code and boundary tests	passed	Forty-seven tests passed across factual routing, ordered reasoning, isolated evaluation, operational boundaries, Daylab, adaptive planning, evaluation-ledger behavior, and local-router budgets.
Live factual grounding probe	passed-with-nonfunctional-warning	A public, non-personal current-fact query forced web search, returned a sourced nonempty answer, recorded the factual-web resolver and three sources. A pre-existing locked log-rotation warning did not affect the response or evidence trace.
Targeted ordered-binding validation	passed	Fourteen of fourteen observations passed, compared with eight of fourteen immediately before the retained candidate. A second full-set execution reproduced fourteen of fourteen.
Final adaptive seven-cycle set	passed-with-capability-findings	Seven cycles completed through append-only resume after the command wrapper reached its execution limit. Final aggregate: 96 of 110 observations passed, with zero evaluation errors, tools, resolvers, sources, or invariant failures.

Current state

The factual-grounding and two-pass local ordered-reasoning routes are active; the failed prompt-only candidate is not present.
The persistent periodic Daylab worker is running again in proposal-only mode.
The largest remaining clean gaps are reading-list tag adherence, epistemic wording, and several rule-induction or calibration cases.

Next steps

Repeat the retained-state adaptive set on later cycles to measure whether the 87.3% aggregate and 100% ordered-binding result remain stable.
Treat the reading-list, epistemic, and remaining rule-induction misses as separate candidate hypotheses rather than expanding the retained reasoning route broadly.
Add targeted coverage for factual-route tool failure and source-summary formatting before widening its classifier vocabulary.
Do not grant additional autonomy or external write authority from this evidence alone.