Primitive

Decision

The steering action taken from evidence.

Definition

A decision is a steering action over the research state. It records that a human, policy, or agent chose to continue, branch, stop, rerun, promote, investigate, or allocate budget. Decisions make autonomous research inspectable because they explain why the swarm moved from one card or lineage to the next.

How It Looks

EvidenceDecisionPolicy / next work

A decision looks like: stop the current self-training row, branch from card 17 into representation-geometry, allocate four GPUs for six hours, and require transfer evaluation before promotion.

How To Use It

Use decisions when evidence changes the research plan. The phone UI should be built around decisions, not raw logs: continue, branch, stop, rerun, promote, or investigate.

Phone Control

The operator should be able to check Picidae on a phone and make one high-leverage decision. They should not need to read terminal output or inspect every artifact unless they choose to drill down.

Human And Policy

Some decisions are made by policy, some by agents, and some by humans. Picidae should record all three. The important part is that downstream work can explain which decision authorized it and which evidence motivated that decision.

Promotion Gates

Promotion is a special decision. A result should not become trusted memory or a reusable artifact merely because it has the best score. It should pass the required evaluation, transfer, ablation, complexity, and suspicion checks for the workspace.

Show Examples

Branch decision

An insight plot suggests an old card contains the useful mechanism. The human branches from that card instead of continuing the latest frontier.

decision:
  action: branch
  actor: human
  target: card_17
  reason: plot shows mechanism was introduced here
  budget:
    gpu_hours: 24
  creates_lineage: disagreement-weighting

Promotion decision

A policy promotes a result only after it survives seeds, transfer, and evaluator integrity checks.

decision:
  action: promote
  target: card_88
  gates:
    seeds: passed
    transfer_eval: passed
    complexity: acceptable
    hack_radar: clean

Owns / Defines

Actor, target card or lineage, action, reason, evidence links, approval state, and downstream policy update.

Questions Operators Should Answer

  • What evidence triggered the decision?
  • Who or what made the decision: human, policy, or agent?
  • Which card, lineage, run, artifact, or memory does it affect?
  • What work is authorized next, and what budget or constraints apply?
  • Should this decision become durable memory for future agents?