dos-self-improvelisted

# dos-self-improve — the loop where DOS adjudicates its own improvement > **The first self-improving work loop for DOS.** It proposes a change, checks it, > measures it, and keeps it **only if a witness the change's author did not write > confirms it improved** — the green suite on a clean worktree, the truth syscall, > and a strictly-measured metric gain. Everything else is reverted. The keep > decision is the kernel's `improve` verdict, not the loop's opinion of its own > work. A run of candidates nothing accepts trips a breaker that hands the > judgment back to a human. This is the dispatch loop (`/dos-dispatch-loop`) **turned inward on a codebase's own source**, with the one rule no prior auto-improver enforced: > A self-improving loop's fatal failure mode is **grading its own homework** — the > agent that wrote the change is the same one that says "yes, this is better," so it > learns to *narrate* improvement instead of making it. `dos improve` closes that > hole: the keep-bit is a pure function of facts the loop did not author, so the > loop **cannot keep a change by claiming it is better.** The only path to KEEP is > to actually move a metric the environment measures. The recursive-self-improvement literature names verification as the gating constraint ("requiring verification regimes enabling labs to confirm"; "human judgment on which problems matter remains the bottleneck"). This loop *is* that verification regime, with the human kept in the loop by construction