meta-optimize

Meta-Optimize: Outer-Loop Harness Optimization for ARIS

Analyze accumulated usage logs and propose optimizations for: $ARGUMENTS

Context

ARIS is a research harness — a system of skills, bridges, workflows, and artifact contracts that wraps around LLMs to orchestrate research. This skill implements a prototype outer loop that observes how the harness is used and proposes improvements to the harness itself (not to the research artifacts it produces).

Inspired by Meta-Harness (Lee et al., 2026): the key insight is that harness design matters as much as model weights, and harness engineering can be partially automated by logging execution traces and using them to guide improvements.

What This Skill Optimizes (Harness Components)

Component	Example	Optimizable?
SKILL.md prompts	Reviewer instructions, quality gates, step descriptions	Yes
Default parameters	difficulty: medium, MAX_ROUNDS: 4, threshold: 6/10	Yes
Convergence rules	When to stop the review loop, retry counts	Yes
Workflow ordering	Skill chain sequence within a workflow	Yes
Artifact schemas	What fields go in EXPERIMENT_LOG.md, idea-stage/IDEA_REPORT.md	Cautious
MCP bridge config	Which reviewer model, routing rules	No (infra)

Not optimized: The research artifacts themselves (papers, code, experiments). That's what the regular workflows do.

Prerequisites

1. Logging must be active. Copy templates/claude-hooks/meta_logging.json into your project's .claude/settings.json (or merge the hooks section).
2. Sufficient data. At least 5 complete workflow runs logged in .aris/meta/events.jsonl. The skill will check and warn if insufficient.

Workflow

Step 0: Check Data Availability

EVENTS_FILE=".aris/meta/events.jsonl"
if [ ! -f "$EVENTS_FILE" ]; then
    echo "ERROR: No event log found at $EVENTS_FILE"
    echo "Enable logging first: copy templates/claude-hooks/meta_logging.json into .claude/settings.json"
    exit 1
fi

EVENT_COUNT=$(wc -l < "$EVENTS_FILE")
SKILL_INVOCATIONS=$(grep -c '"skill_invoke"' "$EVENTS_FILE" || echo 0)
SESSIONS=$(grep -c '"session_start"' "$EVENTS_FILE" || echo 0)

echo "📊 Event log: $EVENT_COUNT events, $SKILL_INVOCATIONS skill invocations, $SESSIONS sessions"

if [ "$SKILL_INVOCATIONS" -lt 5 ]; then
    echo "⚠️  Insufficient data (<5 skill invocations). Continue using ARIS normally and re-run later."
    exit 0
fi