EVOLUTION is the final optional state of the Inquiry cycle. When enabled, DARWIN proposes changes to the methodology itself as public issues in the Inquiry repository. Your code never leaves your machine.
After EXECUTE and END, if evolution.enabled is true, DARWIN reads the persisted cycle artifacts — notably cleanrooms/<issue>/analyze/diagnosis.md, cleanrooms/<issue>/plan.md, and .inquiry/mutations.md — and composes one or more mutation proposals. Those proposals are filed as GitHub issues in the Inquiry repository. Each issue describes what DARWIN thinks should change about the framework: new states, modified agent prompts, better preconditions, or deprecated agents.
The proposals aren't applied automatically. They enter the same review flow as any GitHub issue — the maintainer decides whether to accept, reject, or modify. The collapse from nine lore apes to four happened through this mechanism.
The scope is narrow and explicit. DARWIN reads the cycle artifacts required for process evaluation, not arbitrary project content.
cleanrooms/<issue>/: diagnosis.md, plan.md, and related metrics files when present
.inquiry/mutations.md and DARWIN's own synthesis of the cycle
One flag in .inquiry/config.yaml. The cycle proceeds as usual; at the boundary between END and IDLE, DARWIN activates.
# .inquiry/config.yaml evolution: enabled: true # the rest of your config stays as-is target: copilot language: en
One-shot per cycle. If the EVOLUTION step is interrupted — network failure, manual cancel, any error — the cycle returns to IDLE with no side effects. No half-filed issues, no corrupted state. Safe to experiment with, safe to disable again.
Each cycle should leave APE measurably better.
This is the antifragility thesis applied to the framework itself. Without an evolution loop, the methodology is exactly what it was — locked, static, aging. With it, operational friction becomes proposed improvements. Every time a cycle hits a rough edge that the maintainer had to work around, DARWIN can file a proposal to smooth it.
The guarantee: those proposals are public, auditable, and subject to review. Nothing disappears silently. Nothing happens in a private ops dashboard. The evolution story of Inquiry is told in its issue tracker, in your language, at your approval.
The one-paragraph version you can quote anywhere: EVOLUTION is off by default. When enabled, DARWIN reads only the declared cycle artifacts in cleanrooms/<issue>/ plus .inquiry/mutations.md. Proposals are filed as public issues in the Inquiry repository, with your approval before each filing. No telemetry. No analytics. No third-party service. Your source code stays on your machine.
The agent behind the proposals — what it reads, what it's shaped to produce.
How EVOLUTION fits into the current operational cycle, and the transition contract that gates it.
What DARWIN already changed during the historical bootstrap that reduced nine lore apes to four active ones.