The agent may rebuild its own source within a signed core; proposals, not pull requests

Context

The maintainer’s requirement: the system is self-improving and can commit updates from inside itself. The review’s objection: the immune system and the stem live in the very source the agent edits, and a maintainer drowning in agent pull requests is a maintainer who stops reading them.

The three plans

• Grok: the agent may open PRs against /etc/tacid; a fine-tuned tool-use model published later.
• Fable: agent edits are confined to agent.nix; tacid update pulls upstream.
• Codex: “agent-generated but reviewable” definitions as a long-term direction; supply-chain trust matters more for an agent OS.

Decision

Tacid’s source is an input of every genome. At level 3 or higher the agent may check out tacidos, change it, run the tests, build this machine with --override-input tacidos ./checkout, switch and verify. Crates are partitioned: core (tacid-stem, tacid-keeper, tacid-protocol, the health gate) is channel-signed, verified by the keeper before activation, and replaceable only by the owner; everything else is agent-mutable. A self-built machine is marked and cannot claim stable.

The agent never opens pull requests. It files proposals (branch, CI results, evaluation results, plain-language rationale) into the owner’s queue; the owner reviews, signs (Developer Certificate of Origin) and pushes. Species evolution: proposal → maintainer → CI → channel → every body. Hardware quirks found on one machine become proposals for nix/hardware/. Boards that cannot build Tacid use a workstation body as a remote builder.

Consequences

• “Tacid on Tacid” development from Phase 1.
• The maintainer remains the selection pressure and is not buried.
• Core changes always carry a human signature and two reviews (GOVERNANCE.md).

Alternatives rejected

• The agent pushes to main: the species has no immune system.
• No self-modification: contradicts the vision and wastes the best contributor the project has.