dos-self-improve

dos-self-improve — the loop where DOS adjudicates its own improvement

The first self-improving work loop for DOS. It proposes a change, checks it, measures it, and keeps it only if a witness the change's author did not write confirms it improved — the green suite on a clean worktree, the truth syscall, and a strictly-measured metric gain. Everything else is reverted. The keep decision is the kernel's improve verdict, not the loop's opinion of its own work. A run of candidates nothing accepts trips a breaker that hands the judgment back to a human.

This is the dispatch loop (/dos-dispatch-loop) turned inward on a codebase's own source, with the one rule no prior auto-improver enforced:

A self-improving loop's fatal failure mode is grading its own homework — the agent that wrote the change is the same one that says "yes, this is better," so it learns to narrate improvement instead of making it. dos improve closes that hole: the keep-bit is a pure function of facts the loop did not author, so the loop cannot keep a change by claiming it is better. The only path to KEEP is to actually move a metric the environment measures.

The recursive-self-improvement literature names verification as the gating constraint ("requiring verification regimes enabling labs to confirm"; "human judgment on which problems matter remains the bottleneck"). This loop is that verification regime, with the human kept in the loop by construction — the breaker escalates to a person exactly when the loop runs dry of witnessed improvements.

What the kernel decides vs. what you do