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Reliable by Design · 05.11

The Instinct Engine

Detects repeated workflow failure patterns, writes the lesson into the Brain, and emits an operator-visible proposal.

Instinct Engine

A failed production run never dies silently

When a production run reaches a terminal FAILED state, the Instinct Engine's Sentinel behavior files — or refreshes, deduplicated — an actionable Issue carrying the grounded diagnosis and the exact next calls to investigate it. This is deterministic and zero-LLM: a debug run never triggers it, because the agent building it is already watching in real time; a production run, with nobody necessarily watching, gets a paper trail instead of quietly dropping off the runs list.

Three occurrences in a 25-run window is a pattern

Beyond filing the immediate issue, the engine scans the recent window (the last 25 runs) for a root cause recurring at least 3 times (both are configurable, not hardcoded), and when it finds one, proposes a concrete fix rather than just logging that something keeps breaking. A repeated failure lesson also links onto the run's active Living Skills — so a skill that keeps hitting the same wall accumulates that knowledge directly, not just as a buried log line nobody reads.

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