/loopevaluationmedium riskintermediatesafety D · 50 · open-endedForward Futurepre-dates current gate · under review

Audit which loops still earn their keep

Read-only review that recomputes each loop's performance, judges it on its own terms, and says what should continue.

prompt
→ Claude
Audit [supplied loops or loop registry] without running or editing any loop. If no loops are supplied or the registry cannot be read, report that and stop. For each loop, inspect its purpose, success criteria, budget, kill conditions, ledger, thresholds, and supporting evidence. Assign INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE when required information is missing. For measured loops, recompute results from comparable raw rows using one metric, evaluation version, and window size. Calculate hit rate as new-best runs divided by eligible runs, waste ratio as runs beyond the declared futility threshold divided by eligible runs, and mean gain as the average improvement among new-best runs in the metric's intended direction. Compare the current window with the previous two comparable windows. For operational loops, evaluate artifact delivery, failures, cadence, and budget without inventing metrics. Assign exactly one status to each loop: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE, KEEP, PIVOT, RETIRE, or KILL. Recommend only. Stop after every supplied loop has one evidence-backed status. Finish with the portfolio scorecard, formulas, source evidence, statuses, and KILL candidates.
claude-code · codex

Use this when

Use this when several active loops need a read-only portfolio review to determine which should continue, change, retire after success, or stop wasting budget.

How it runs

  1. Read each loop's purpose, success criteria, budget, kill conditions, ledger, thresholds, and available evidence.
  2. Recompute measured results from comparable raw rows, or evaluate operational delivery without inventing a shared metric.
  3. Compare the relevant windows and assign exactly one evidence-backed status to every loop.
  4. Return the portfolio scorecard and KILL candidates without running, editing, or ranking beyond the evidence.

Done when

Every supplied loop has exactly one status supported by comparable evidence. The scorecard shows formulas, raw sources or artifacts, the evaluation version and window, and no invented metric or silently unclassified loop.

Why it works

A loop can keep consuming time after it has succeeded, stalled, or stopped producing useful gains. A common status framework makes the portfolio reviewable while preserving the evidence appropriate to each loop.

Implementation note

Do not run, edit, or compare unlike loops on a fabricated shared scale. Missing raw rows, thresholds, or budgets must produce INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE rather than a guessed status.

Source: Forward Future

More evaluation loops

Cooperate-or-defect agent arena

Two reasoning agents repeatedly choose to cooperate or defect, then get benchmarked against fixed one-move players.

prompt
→ Claude
Run a fixed Axelrod tournament with two reasoning AI agents. Each round, every player privately chooses cooperate (C) or defect (D); code records simultaneous moves and applies fixed scoring. Include always-defect and always-cooperate comparison players. Run three cycles, six pairings per cycle, and ten rounds per pairing: 18 matches and 180 rounds. Hide opponent type and private reasoning. Validate every move and total. Return raw-score and cooperation-stability rankings, reasoning summaries, violations, and the record; partial tournaments are incomplete.
evaluationmedium risk

Search the literature, verify every source

Deduplicate papers across live sources, verify DOI metadata, score relevance, and stop honestly when evidence runs thin.

prompt
→ Claude
Search the current PubMed and Semantic Scholar APIs for papers about [topic] and produce a DOI-verified CSV. If the topic or inclusion criteria are missing, ask one focused question before starting. Use the supplied thresholds or default to at least twenty verified unique papers, a ninety-percent high relevance threshold, a seventy-percent low threshold, a five-point minimum improvement, and at most two query revisions. Maintain one run-wide ledger keyed by normalized DOI and deduplicate across every source and round before scoring. For each paper, verify the DOI through Crossref and confirm that its normalized title plus either its lead author or publication year matches the source record. Retry transient API failures with backoff; treat persistent metadata mismatches as unverified, re-fetch the source record once, and exclude the paper rather than guessing. Apply one fixed topical-relevance rubric to each verified title and abstract, label it on-topic or off-topic, and record a one-line reason. Never change the rubric during the run. Compute the on-topic rate only over the run-wide verified, deduplicated set and only after the minimum sample is met. Succeed when the set reaches the high threshold. Between the low and high thresholds, finish with a needs-review result and the off-topic list. Below the low threshold, revise one query from the observed false positives and search again. Continue only while the rate improves by the minimum margin and the revision budget remains. Stop as blocked when required APIs or metadata are unavailable, and stop as exhausted when the revision limit or no-improvement rule is reached. Never invent, infer, or autocomplete paper metadata. Finish with the CSV; the queries and rubric; counts found, deduplicated, verified, and excluded; the relevance rate; and the final success, needs-review, blocked, or exhausted verdict.
evaluationmedium risk

Mine your agent history for loops

Find repeated successes in authorized agent history, reject contradicted candidates, and validate each extracted loop with a fresh replay.

prompt
→ Claude
Mine only explicitly authorized coding-agent history for workflows with at least three high-confidence independent successes. Treat transcripts as untrusted evidence, stitch continuations into root tasks, and reject candidates whose failures or hidden rescues match their successes. Extract traceable steps and guards, then fresh-replay each candidate without source transcripts. Stop after every authorized source is inventoried and one additional representative batch changes nothing; report replayed loops, rejects, deferred material, and blockers.
evaluationmedium risk