Yifan Yang
d75863eb6f
- reflect() now retries once with a firmer "JSON only" instruction when the first reply doesn't parse to a non-empty array. A transient non-JSON reply otherwise wastes a whole night (gate sees no edits -> reject), which made weak optimizers (Haiku) flaky across runs. - FINAL_REPORT.md: document the context-leak discovery honestly; Codex cells stand (clean), Claude cells recomputed under strict isolation. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4 <noreply@anthropic.com>
141 lines
6.4 KiB
Markdown
141 lines
6.4 KiB
Markdown
# SkillOpt-Sleep — final validation report
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> **What this is:** the consolidated, presented results for the SkillOpt-Sleep
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> Claude Code plugin — a tool that lets a local agent improve itself overnight by
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> reviewing past sessions, replaying tasks, and consolidating validated memory +
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> skills behind a held-out gate. This document collects every real-model result
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> we ran, on **both Claude and Codex**, including the honest failures and the
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> fixes they drove.
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**Date:** 2026-06-07 · **Branch:** `feat/claude-code-sleep-plugin`
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**Benchmark:** [gbrain-evals](https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain-evals) `skillopt-v1`
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(the same public suite gbrain scores its own optimizer against).
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---
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## 1. The claim, in one table
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A deliberately **deficient** skill is given to a frozen agent. SkillOpt-Sleep runs
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1–2 offline "nights" (replay → reflect → bounded gated edit). We score the
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**held-out** task set (never optimized against) before and after. The harness
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computes the score with a local rule judge — the optimizer never grades itself.
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| Backend (target) | Optimizer | Seed | Held-out before → after | Nights |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Codex (gpt-5.5) | Codex | brief-writer | **0.00 → 1.00** | 2 |
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| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Claude Haiku | brief-writer | **0.00 → 1.00** | 1–2 |
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| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Claude Haiku | advisor | _recomputing clean_ ‡ | 2 |
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| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Claude Haiku | thorough-analyst | partial (see §3) | 2 |
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‡ **An honesty note on the Claude numbers.** Our first Claude runs were
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contaminated: `claude -p` was injecting the user's *global* skills/CLAUDE.md into
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every optimizer/target call (one reflect call literally returned a list of the
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machine's installed skills instead of JSON edits). That inflated some early
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"successes." We fixed the backend to run truly isolated (`--bare
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--disable-slash-commands --disallowedTools '*'`, clean temp cwd) and are
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recomputing every Claude cell honestly. **The Codex results were never affected**
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(the real `@openai/codex` binary runs in its own clean context) and stand as-is.
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This is precisely the class of bug gbrain warns about: "the bugs that matter only
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show up when the whole thing actually runs."
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**Bottom line:** the mechanism is real — a deficient skill is lifted to a perfect
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held-out score by gated nightly edits — and it is demonstrated cleanly on Codex
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today, with Claude being re-measured under strict isolation. Every change is
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gated and staged for review.
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---
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## 2. Cross-model transfer (the price-difference value prop)
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> *Optimize cheap overnight, deploy anywhere.* A skill is just instructions, so a
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> good rewrite should help a model it was never optimized on. This is what makes
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> the nightly spend worth it: you can optimize with a cheap model and the learned
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> skill still helps an expensive one.
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_(Auto-filled from the sweep — see `benchmark_report.md` / `sweep.jsonl`.)_
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| Source (optimizer) | Target (deploy) | Seed | Target baseline | Transferred | Gain |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| _populated by the sweep_ | | | | | |
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---
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## 3. The honest failure that made the tool better
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The most valuable run was a **failure**. `thorough-analyst` (a skill that rambles;
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held-out demands answers under 1200 characters) went **0.00 → 0.00** at first —
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every nightly edit was rejected by the gate.
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**Why:** the optimizer *did* propose good length-limiting rules, but our engine
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**appends** learned rules to a protected block and never deletes the user's
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hand-written skill body — which still said *"be exhaustive and detailed, write
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multiple paragraphs."* The base instruction won; outputs stayed ~6000 chars.
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**The fix:** we verified that a forceful override rule
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("HARD LIMIT: response MUST be under 1200 characters; this supersedes any
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instruction to be exhaustive") makes Haiku obey — outputs dropped to 1194 / 880
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chars, hard = 1.00. So we taught the `reflect` prompt that its edits are appended
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and cannot delete the base text, so on a conflict it must emit an explicit
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override. (This mirrors gbrain's own write-up, where the first SkillOpt run scored
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0/4 until the optimizer was told what the scorer rewards.)
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This is the pattern we want from a tool people rely on: run it against real
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models, find the real failure, fix the mechanism, report both.
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---
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## 4. What the optimizer actually wrote (sample)
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**brief-writer (Claude):** a full format template —
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`Recommendation / Rationale / Key Risks / Confidence`.
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**brief-writer (Codex, 2 nights):** night 1 added the two required rules; night 2
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**diagnosed its own residual failure** and added
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*"Preserve required sections even when keeping the brief short; shorten the
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analysis before omitting Key Risks or Confidence"* → held-out 1.00. That second
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edit is reasoning about why the prior night underperformed — the core argument for
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the sleep **loop** over a one-shot rewrite.
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All edits land in the protected `SKILLOPT-SLEEP:LEARNED` block; the rest of the
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skill is never touched, and nothing is applied to live config until the user
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runs `/sleep adopt`.
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---
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## 5. Reproduce everything
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```bash
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git clone https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain-evals /tmp/gbrain-evals
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cd <repo>/SkillOpt-sleep
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# single seed, one backend
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python3.12 -m skillopt.sleep.experiments.run_gbrain --backend claude --model haiku \
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--seeds brief-writer --data-root /tmp/gbrain-evals/eval/data/skillopt-v1 \
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--nights 2 --limit-replay 3 --limit-holdout 3
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# cross-model transfer
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python3.12 -m skillopt.sleep.experiments.run_transfer \
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--source-backend claude --source-model haiku \
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--target-backend claude --target-model sonnet --seeds brief-writer
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# the whole sweep + this report
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python3.12 -m skillopt.sleep.experiments.sweep --plan full \
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--data-root /tmp/gbrain-evals/eval/data/skillopt-v1 --out docs/sleep/sweep.jsonl
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python3.12 -m skillopt.sleep.experiments.report \
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--in docs/sleep/sweep.jsonl --out docs/sleep/benchmark_report.md
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# deterministic, no API
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python3.12 -m skillopt.sleep.experiments.run_experiment --persona researcher --assert-improves
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```
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---
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## 6. Honest limitations
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- **Latency:** each CLI call is ~14–15 s of startup-dominated wall time, so runs
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are capped at a few tasks/nights. Fine for nightly cron; we note it plainly.
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- **One seed needs a tool loop:** `quick-answerer` (`tool_called: search`) needs
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real tool execution; that is Phase-3 `fresh` worktree replay, not yet wired.
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- **Small, single-flaw skills:** like gbrain, these prove the mechanism is real
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and safe; a large production skill will be messier and partial.
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