Hiro development journal

First active Stage 6B candidate search

2026.08.09 at 12:59:49 America/Los_Angeles Cycle complete; no qualifying candidate produced Machine-readable JSON

Executive summary

Following user direction to favor active, reversible progress over passive waiting, Hiro ran one fresh proposal-only self-improvement v2 cycle during the bounded Stage 6B activation window.

The cycle completed successfully in 2.5 minutes with 16 evaluation observations, a 100% public-suite pass rate, zero evaluation failures, 22 lightweight regression probes, four curiosity hypotheses, and zero improvement specifications.

Because the run produced no ImprovementSpec, there was no genuine Stage 3 candidate to construct, no Stage 4 recommendation to freeze, and no Stage 5 evidence to present to Stage 6B.

The previous epistemics failure did not recur in this run, and no external held-out evaluation vault is configured. Advancing that older diagnostic opportunity would therefore lack both reproducibility and matching held-out evidence.

A production architecture gap was also confirmed: Hiro's autonomous sandbox constructs only code-changing Stage 2–4 candidates and deliberately stops before Stage 5, while no implemented evidence-only materializer converts real Stage 3–5 artifacts into the Stage 6B inbox schema.

No evidence was fabricated to satisfy the parser. Stage 6B remained healthy and idle with an empty inbox, zero promotion events, zero outcomes, and no branch mutation.

Work completed

Supported pipeline audit

Completed

Inspected the proposal-only v2 runner, cycle coordinator, Stage 3 candidate builder, Stage 4 candidate evaluator, Stage 5 isolated integrator, autonomous sandbox, and Stage 6B runner and packet validator.
Confirmed the autonomous sandbox requires code-changing specifications, external held-out evidence, and a clean repository, and always stops before Stage 5 integration.
Confirmed Stage 6B accepts only its distinct frozen evidence-candidate schema and scans a dedicated runtime inbox.
Repository search found validation and test fixtures for that schema but no production materializer that creates it from evidence-only Stage 3–5 output.

Fresh bounded self-improvement cycle

Completed successfully

Ran self-improvement v2 in proposal_only mode with a ten-minute maximum and a daylab evaluation label.
The public evaluation executed 16 observations and passed all of them.
The competence loop reviewed 100 recent response envelopes, including two blocked records, but produced no improvement specification.
The curiosity loop produced four hypotheses and the personality journal completed.
All 22 lightweight probes executed: 21 reported pass and one sports-resolver probe reported degraded rather than a hard failure.

Candidate admission decision

No candidate admitted

Did not reuse the older epistemics proposal because the fresh public cycle passed and did not reproduce its failure.
Did not claim matching held-out evidence because the required external vault is not configured.
Did not hand-author Stage 4 or Stage 5 success packets merely to satisfy Stage 6B's structural parser.
Left the Stage 6 inbox empty and allowed the runner to continue idling.

Stage 6B continuity

Healthy and idle

The bounded scheduler continued returning result code zero.
The candidate inbox contained zero JSON packets.
The append-only promotion ledger contained zero events and zero outcomes.
Hiro's Git worktree remained clean and its active revision remained unchanged.

Decisions and reasoning

Interpret liberal progress as actively running bounded evidence collection, not lowering evidence integrity or inventing missing stage results.
Use the current real cycle rather than assuming the prior evaluation failure remains actionable.
Require a reproducible opportunity before candidate construction and matching held-out evidence before a claim of broad evaluation readiness.
Treat the missing evidence-only Stage 3–5 materializer as an engineering gap to close explicitly, not an invitation to bypass stage semantics.
Keep Stage 6B idle when no candidate exists; an unused activation is preferable to a false promotion record.
Preserve the distinction between curiosity hypotheses and improvement specifications: curiosity alone is not a promotion candidate.

Validation and evidence

Check	Status	Result
Bounded v2 process	passed	The proposal-only cycle completed in 2.5 minutes within its ten-minute limit and reported no internal errors.
Fresh public evaluation	passed	All 16 observations passed for a 100% pass rate with zero failures.
Lightweight regression probes	completed	All 22 probes ran; 21 passed and one sports-resolver probe was classified as degraded.
Improvement specification output	no candidate	The run produced zero ImprovementSpecs, so Stage 3 construction was not entered.
Held-out evidence availability	unavailable	No external held-out vault is configured for the autonomous sandbox path. No held-out success claim was made.
Stage 6B state	passed	The scheduler remained healthy, the inbox was empty, the ledger had zero events and outcomes, and no promotion occurred.

Current state

Stage 6B remains activated under the existing one-promotion, 72-hour authorization and is idle.
The active Hiro worktree is clean and unchanged at revision 83902be5399cb4d90b95fb39422f2c9f126f1220.
The newest self-improvement run produced no specification and therefore no candidate.
The previous epistemics failure did not reproduce in the fresh public run.
The evidence-only Stage 3–5-to-Stage 6 production bridge is not implemented.
No held-out vault is configured for autonomous candidate evaluation.

Next steps

Design and implement a production evidence-only materializer that derives its packet from real opportunity, baseline, candidate, Stage 4, and Stage 5 artifacts and rejects semantic inconsistencies rather than checking labels alone.
Add focused tests proving the bridge cannot invent missing evidence, reuse stale opportunities, omit held-out requirements when applicable, or broaden the Stage 6B allowlist.
Run the bridge in shadow against historical evidence before allowing it to write to the active Stage 6 inbox.
Configure or deliberately replace the held-out evidence dependency through a separate reviewed decision; do not silently weaken it.
Continue bounded evaluation cycles, and admit at most one candidate only when a real reproducible opportunity and complete evidence chain exist.