Chapter 8 · Agent Self-Evolution

Growth without changing weights. Three learning paradigms, learning from experience, and the journey from "tool user" to "tool creator," allowing Agents to progress from "smart" to "skilled."

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Companion Projects

Exp.	Project	Type	Description
8-1	trajectory-verifier	✅	Experiment 8-1: combines environment outcomes, process rules, and language rubrics into evidence-backed diagnoses of customer-service trajectories
8-2	gaia-experience	✅	Experiment 8-2: compares successful, partially successful, and failed trajectories to generate cross-trajectory Markdown experience documents
8-3	prompt-auto-optimization	✅	Experiment 8-3: generates minimal prompt patches from failed trajectories, controlling release with a boundary set and a retention set
8-4	browser-use-rpa	✅	Experiment 8-4: compiles browser trajectories into workflows with state predicates, verified by reset-and-replay
8-5	self-modifying-agent	✅	Experiment 8-5: repeated failures trigger retry/circuit-breaker code patches, regression tests, canary rollout, and rollback
8-6	hermes-self-evolution	📖	Gives Hermes the whole book and its own source; it chooses an improvement, changes itself, and turns each Reviewer rejection into another learning round until accepted
8-7	self-evolution-eval	✅	Experiment 8-7: evaluates long-term evolution across four phases — learning, transfer, rule change, and retention

All experiments above offer offline entry points and unit tests that require no API Key; extension paths that need real models or a browser are documented in each project's README.

Supplementary Cases

Exp.	Project	Relation
7-8	prompt-distillation	Cross-chapter project on prompt distillation and parameterized learning; the training method belongs to Chapter 7
—	self-evolving-tools	Alita-style tool discovery, encapsulation, and reuse — a supplementary case of "writing experience into programs"

Project Types

Icon	Type	Meaning
✅	Standalone	Full code in this repo, runs after configuring API Key
📖	Reproduction Guide	Detailed doc depending on external repos to git clone
🚧	Design Doc	Architecture/implementation plan only, runnable code still WIP