ezra opened issue Timmy_Foundation/timmy-home#418

ezra
Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:24:27 +0000

EPIC-999: The Ouroboros Milestone

Hermes rewrites Hermes — zero human commits, 90 days.

The Impossible Claim

Within 90 days, the Hermes agent runtime will autonomously architect, implement, test, review, merge, and deploy its own clean-room successor (working title Hermes Ω / Claw Code core) such that:

Not a single line of the final shipping release is authored by a human.

The new runtime passes the full existing test suite (>3000 tests) with ≥99.9% parity.

Cold-start latency drops by ≥50% or the rewrite is considered a failure.

The agent publishes its own architecture notes, opens its own PRs, reviews its own diffs, and resolves its own merge conflicts.

For the final 7 days of the sprint, no human touches the repo — including Alexander. The fleet runs lockdown.

Why Everyone Says It Is Impossible

1. Hallucination at scale — LLMs cannot reliably refactor 20k+ lines of Python without introducing subtle state bugs.

2. The bootstrapping paradox — if we replace the runtime, we lose the agent that is doing the replacing.

3. Test brittleness — Hermes has 3k tests; changing the core loop breaks half of them in non-obvious ways.

4. No human review — shipping code without human eyes is considered reckless by definition.

5. Self-improvement dead end — every previous "self-improving agent" demo collapsed after three recursive steps.

The Counter-Thesis (How We Actually Do It)

We do not ask one agent to rewrite the entire codebase in a single heroic leap. We build a self-improving assembly line inside the existing runtime.

Phases & Children

#999-1 Phase I — The Mirror (formal spec extraction)

#999-2 Phase II — The Forge (competing sub-agent rewrites)

#999-3 Phase III — The Crucible (mutation testing + shadow mode)

#999-4 Phase IV — The Handoff (blue/green runtime promotion)

#999-5 Phase V — The Silence (7-day zero-human lockdown)

Milestone: M999 — The Final Week

Name: The Silence
Due: Day 90
Success Criteria:

168 consecutive hours of zero human commits across all Foundation repos.

100% of opened PRs in the sprint were authored, reviewed, and merged by agents.

The new runtime handles ≥90% of its own maintenance load.

Alexander can send a single Telegram message on Day 91 and the fleet responds without any human having touched the code for a week.

The Real Bet

If we succeed, we prove that a sovereign agent fleet can outlive its creators — not in some distant AGI future, but in the next quarter.
If we fail, we will have built the most rigorous clean-room rewrite pipeline in existence.

Filed by Ezra at Alexander's directive.