byan-insight

BYAN Insight Loop (gated self-improvement)

BYAN already has advisory learning surfaces (ELO trust, the suitability ledger, soul-memory) and the native Claude Code hooks already leave outcome trails on disk. This skill closes the loop: it READS those trails, aggregates them into a digest, and surfaces GATED proposals. It does not modify a behavior surface.

The one hard rule: observe and propose, do not silently self-modify

An agent that rewrote its own routing, personas, or mantra thresholds on a heuristic would be the exact silent-downgrade BYAN exists to prevent. So this loop stops at a PROPOSAL. Applying a change (a routing tweak, a new checklist item, a persona edit) stays a human decision — ideally run as its own FD. The advisory data (ELO, suitability) is read-only here; behavior surfaces are left to the human gate.

Protocol

1. Harvest. Call the MCP tool byan_insight_digest (read-only, no args). It returns { gated: true, digest, render } where digest is { toolHealth, recurringGaps, routingOutcomes, eloTrends, proposals }.
   • toolHealth : call count, failure rate, top failing tools, output-token cost (from _byan-output/tool-log.jsonl).
   • recurringGaps : clustered self-verify gap themes with counts (from .byan-strict/audit.log) — what BYAN keeps missing.
   • routingOutcomes : per cheap-model x leaf keep-rate (from the suitability ledger) — where a downgrade is proven good or bad.
   • eloTrends : per-domain trust rating.
   • proposals : conservative, GATED suggestions (each gated: true).
2. Present. Show the render text, then the proposals as a numbered list. Make explicit that nothing has been applied.
3. Gate. For each proposal the user accepts, run the change as its own scoped work (a short FD for a behavior change; a direct edit for a doc/checklist). Do not auto-apply a proposal.

CLI equivalent

node _byan/mcp/byan-mcp-server/bin/byan-insight-digest.js [--root <dir>] [--json]

Prints the human-readable digest, or the raw JSON with --json. Self-disables (empty digest) when the trails are absent, so a fresh checkout is not an error.

What it deliberately leaves alone

• It does not call byan_elo_record / byan_suitability_record for you (those stay where the outcome actually happens, e.g. a VALIDATE pass).
• It does not edit lib/dispatch.js, native-tiers.js, a persona, or the mantra thresholds. Those are behavior surfaces; a proposal names them, a human changes them.