Hiro development journal

Completing Hiro's first autonomous offline candidate cycle

2026.08.05 at 21:05:14 America/Los_Angeles Validated and published Machine-readable JSON

Executive summary

Completed Hiro's first end-to-end autonomous offline candidate cycle from a clean, isolated Git baseline while preserving the existing dirty live working tree.

Hiro independently constructed and tested a narrowly scoped notification-safety candidate, ran the public and secret held-out evaluation lanes, froze signed evidence, retained the result for benchmark review, and correctly declined eligibility because it produced no statistically measurable score improvement.

The candidate passed 45 targeted and regression tests, and both baseline and candidate scored 1.0 on the public and held-out suites. The unchanged scores and overlapping confidence intervals caused the broad evaluation gate to reject promotion.

No candidate code was integrated, no Telegram notification was sent, and no deployment, service restart, schedule change, or Stage 6 activation occurred.

Work completed

Clean isolated baseline

Completed

Created a local isolated Git clone containing the current Hiro working state and committed operator-only baseline snapshots there, leaving Hiro's active branch at its original commit.
A fresh offline discovery evaluation produced 16 observations with 15 passes and identified a repeatable output-contract opportunity.
An initial proposed evaluation-system change was rejected by the protected-path boundary, demonstrating that autonomous construction could not modify its own scoring or examination machinery.
The final candidate was restricted to the notification sender and a new target test file in an external candidate worktree.

Local model reliability

Recovered and hardened

The first construction attempts exhausted the local model's completion budget in hidden reasoning and returned no machine-readable patch payload.
A higher-context reload attempt did not become responsive. After manual recovery, the local Qwen model was available at a 4,096-token context.
Candidate construction was updated to use LM Studio's JSON-schema structured output. The router now preserves a valid structured payload when this model profile returns it through reasoning output rather than the ordinary content field.
Subprocess evidence decoding was made explicitly UTF-8 with replacement for invalid bytes, and repair prompts now carry compact bounded failure evidence so retries fit the recovered context window.

Evidence provenance and Stage 4 handoff

Completed

A successful candidate construction initially stopped at the Stage 4 handoff because the Step 2 baseline manifest omitted its Git commit while the candidate packet correctly named one.
The coordinator now resolves and records the evaluated checkout's actual HEAD when no explicit commit is supplied. The evaluator's equality check was retained unchanged.
The final run bound Step 2 and the candidate to isolated baseline commit 8b2f72f1c4b072bb80f616e1dff84d083e04f409 and completed Stage 4.
Run, candidate, and recommendation packet SHA-256 companion files were independently recalculated and matched.

Autonomous candidate outcome

Retained but not eligible

Candidate sandbox-20260806035751-2c08fb41-01 added a fail-closed guard for missing Telegram credentials and generated its own target tests.
The target and configured regression command passed all 45 tests in 1.68 seconds.
Public baseline and candidate scores were both 1.0; secret held-out baseline and candidate scores were also both 1.0, with no invariant regression.
The promotion gate rejected the candidate because both score deltas were 0.0, below the required 0.02, and both confidence intervals overlapped. The frozen recommendation remains available for human benchmark review but is not eligible for automatic handling.

Decisions and reasoning

Treat the completed rejected candidate as a successful end-to-end systems exercise, not as an approved code improvement.
Keep the protected evaluation boundary and strict baseline-commit equality check intact.
Use structured local-model output and bounded repair evidence so candidate construction remains viable within the recovered 4,096-token context.
Write the final candidate record to Hiro's benchmark ledger while keeping all candidate source mutations in the external worktree.
Send Telegram review alerts only for eligible candidates; this rejected candidate correctly produced no notification.
Keep automatic promotion, deployment, internet access, and Stage 6 disabled.

Validation and evidence

Check	Status	Result
Coordinator, candidate builder, and candidate evaluator focused suite	passed	27 tests passed in 41.69 seconds, including the new automatic Git-HEAD manifest binding test.
Candidate target and configured regression suite	passed	45 tests passed in 1.68 seconds inside the external candidate worktree.
Public and held-out Stage 4 evaluation	passed with rejected recommendation	Both baseline and candidate scored 1.0 on both suites with no invariant regression; the gate rejected eligibility because the required measurable improvement was absent.
Frozen evidence integrity	passed	Run SHA-256 55d8e7e26dae8009732eb7f5aad0e8984d58d57841cdb98fec343c236aef02fe, candidate SHA-256 9b3584054a304beb9888282a7efa1e8d14bd23753238dd4e2509ca08fba28445, and recommendation SHA-256 9454b07a6e117bfcd8b18f966dc67eeae83a7fdef65c61b7ad91ed103f0b2b4f independently matched their companion files.
Repository-wide Hiro test suite	passed	The intact live checkout passed all 327 tests in 145.94 seconds. The isolated snapshot could not collect two tests whose ignored development-cycle modules were not copied into the clone, so the authoritative broad run used the intact checkout.
Hiro journal generation and frontend build	passed	The timestamped-entry test and production build completed successfully before publication.

Current state

The first autonomous offline construction-to-retention cycle is complete.
The candidate is retained as frozen benchmark evidence and marked ineligible; it has not been applied to Hiro.
Hiro's active HEAD remains c9148f1ec4cf9164e4256cc3ce93efdd6794282a, while the clean isolated evaluation baseline is 8b2f72f1c4b072bb80f616e1dff84d083e04f409.
Stage 6 remains disabled, and internet access remains off.

Next steps

Review the retained candidate and its complete autonomous evidence on the benchmark page; do not apply it merely because its tests passed.
Reconcile the live Hiro working tree into an intentional clean baseline so future scheduled cycles can run without a manually prepared clone.
Improve evaluation routing for maintenance candidates so behavior-specific gates can measure their intended safety property without weakening broad public and held-out gates.
After the clean baseline is established, implement the separately designed read-only, allowlisted internet-observation lane and run it under a shadow probation with no promotion authority.