Hiro development journal

Continuous improvement idea discovery is live but deliberately narrow

2026.08.11 at 08:16:17 America/Los_Angeles Read-only diagnosis completed; no Hiro behavior changed Machine-readable JSON

Executive summary

Hiro's active improvement coordinator is connected to the long-lived scheduler and is checked once per minute.

A completed first cycle is recorded at 07:53 Pacific time. It completed normally but produced zero improvement specifications and zero candidates.

The current proposal generator derives actionable ideas mainly from public evaluation failures and a small set of predefined response-envelope patterns, including timeouts, blocked grounding, selected server errors, and slow factual requests.

The coordinator also watches server-log and metacognition changes when deciding whether to wake, but the current proposal generator does not directly convert those two evidence streams into improvement specifications.

Curiosity questions are generated from observed usage patterns, but they do not currently enter autonomous candidate construction unless they are first converted into a code-changing improvement specification.

Work completed

Scheduler and cadence trace

Connected and active

The long-lived scheduler invokes the evidence-driven improvement due-check once per minute.
A changed evidence fingerprint can start a cycle after a 30-minute minimum interval.
If evidence remains unchanged, an idle-discovery cycle becomes due after four hours.
Legacy automatic Daylab, Nightlab, and internet-observation schedules remain disabled.

Idea-source trace

Working within a limited rule set

Each proposal-only cycle can harvest public benchmark failures and translate a qualifying failure signal into an improvement specification.
Recent response envelopes are inspected for predefined patterns: web-search timeouts, grounding-related blocks, selected HTTP errors, and high-latency factual requests.
The curiosity pass asks broader questions about slow tool paths, missing resolvers, user satisfaction, capability gaps, and proactive partnership.
Lightweight regression probes provide an additional source of measured evidence.
No public-internet research or unrestricted model-led brainstorming is part of this automatic discovery path.

Downstream candidate path

Available when a qualifying specification exists

Only code-changing improvement specifications are handed to autonomous candidate construction.
Candidates are built in external worktrees and must pass public evaluation, held-out evaluation, regression, invariant, and latency checks before isolated integration can proceed.
Stage 5 handles isolated integration and reporting; Stage 6 separately controls any active-branch promotion.
Stage 6C observes and validates promoted behavior downstream. It is not itself a source of improvement ideas.

Decisions and reasoning

Describe the current mechanism as evidence-driven pattern detection, not as open-ended autonomous ideation.
Treat server-log and metacognition records as wake-up inputs until a direct proposal-conversion path is implemented and validated.
Treat curiosity items as research prompts, not actionable candidates, unless they are promoted into complete code-changing specifications.
Make no Hiro code, policy, schedule, campaign, or promotion changes during this explanatory diagnosis.

Validation and evidence

Check	Status	Result
Scheduler connection	passed by source inspection	The recurring scheduler creates an active-improvement due-check task and sleeps for 60 seconds between iterations.
Active policy	passed by source inspection	The active policy is enabled with a 60-second poll, 30-minute minimum cycle interval, and four-hour maximum idle-discovery interval.
First live cycle record	completed with no candidates	The frozen state records a completed first cycle at 07:53 Pacific time with zero specifications, zero candidates, and a no-candidates sandbox result.
Idea-generation inputs	partially connected	Public evaluation and response-envelope patterns can create specifications. Server-log and metacognition changes affect the wake-up fingerprint but are not directly consumed by the active specification generator.
Hiro tests	not run	This session performed read-only source and runtime-state inspection. No Hiro files changed, so no Hiro test claim is made.
Journal test suite	passed	The required timestamped-entry journal tests completed successfully.
Journal production build	passed	The required journal generation, output validation, TypeScript compilation, and production build completed successfully for 100 entries.

Current state

The active improvement loop is scheduled and its first cycle completed normally.
No actionable improvement packet is currently present from that first cycle.
New response evidence can cause another cycle after the minimum interval, and an idle cycle is due no later than four hours after the prior completion.
The candidate sandbox, Stage 5, and Stage 6 remain downstream gates and do not run when discovery yields no code-changing specification.

Next steps

Decide whether Hiro should add a bounded, evidence-cited ideation stage that converts metacognition, user corrections, and benchmark trends into complete improvement specifications.
Add direct ingestion for the evidence streams already included in the wake-up fingerprint, with deduplication and minimum-evidence thresholds.
Add a controlled path for promoting promising curiosity questions into scoped experiments and code-changing specifications.
Retain external worktree construction, held-out evaluation, reversible integration, probation, and rollback controls for every resulting candidate.
Expose the difference between wake-up evidence, generated ideas, eligible candidates, and promoted changes on the benchmark page.