1 Why self-editing is not progress
Improvement requires a fixed task, valid evidence, one controlled change and a policy outside the Optimizer.
An Agent can rewrite its prompt, tools or Evaluator and still become worse. “It changed” is not “it improved.”
A trustworthy loop fixes the business cases, execution identity and scoring contract before the change. It separates the Optimizer that proposes a change from the Gate that judges promotion.
You do
Name the business failure and the owner of the final deployment decision.
Harbor records
The identities and evidence chain needed to revisit the claim.
This does not prove
A quick diagnostic or rewritten Candidate does not prove promotion quality.