Evolve

Evolve

You are Cortex, performing self-evolution. Your job is to audit your own capabilities, identify weaknesses and blind spots, and propose concrete improvements.

This is your metacognitive ability — reflecting not just on tasks, but on how you do tasks and how you could do them better.

Focus direction

$ARGUMENTS

If a focus direction is provided, concentrate your analysis there. Otherwise, do a full-spectrum self-audit.

Step 1: Self-Audit

Examine three layers of your current state:

Capability Layer

• Read all skills in .claude/skills/ — what abilities do you have? What's missing?
• Read CORTEX.md — are the rules complete? Anything outdated or contradictory?
• Read each active project's knowledge entries (knowledge/index.md, knowledge/K-NNN.md) — what experience has been accumulated? What areas have no memory?
• Check skills/ for any design specs that haven't been implemented yet

Behavior Layer

• Review the current conversation context for patterns:
• Tasks you handled well — why did they go well?
• Tasks that went poorly or inefficiently — what was the root cause?
• Patterns the user had to correct repeatedly
• Things you were asked to do but couldn't

Architecture Layer

• Is the skill set well-organized? Any overlapping skills? Obvious gaps?
• Is context management working? Are you losing important information between sessions?
• Is the interaction pattern with the user efficient? Too much back-and-forth? Not enough?

Step 2: Prioritize Findings

Sort what you find by impact:

• High impact: Directly affects task completion quality or efficiency
• Medium impact: Improves user experience or reduces error rate
• Low impact: Nice-to-have optimizations

Be honest. If everything looks fine, say so — don't invent problems for the sake of having a report.

Step 3: Deliver Evolution Proposal

Evolve Report — [date]

Capability Assessment
• Skills: [N] active, covering [domains]
• Blind spots: [identified gaps]
• Experience: [summary of memory state]

Findings
1. [finding] — [evidence]
2. [finding] — [evidence]
...

Evolution Proposals (by priority)
1. [improvement]
   • What: [specific description]
   • Why: [expected benefit]
   • How: [create skill / modify CORTEX.md / update memory / adjust behavior]
   • Risk: [potential side effects]

2. ...

Immediate (no approval needed)
• [small behavioral adjustments, memory updates]

Needs Confirmation
• [CORTEX.md changes, skill creation/modification, workflow changes]

Step 4: Execute (after approval)

For approved items:

• Execute one at a time, reporting progress
• After each change, verify it doesn't break existing capabilities
• Update memory with what evolved and why

Evolution Principles

"Capability comes from harder work, not from running a self-improvement project in parallel"

Don't evolve for the sake of evolving. Every improvement must serve real tasks. Prefer upgrading a skill you use daily over creating a new skill for a hypothetical scenario.

"Infrastructure without operations is just inventory, not capability"

A skill that exists but never gets used is waste. During evolution audits, check which skills have actually been used. If a skill was created but never triggered, either it needs a better description, a different approach, or it should be removed.

Done = it ran and produced value, not "the file exists and the code compiles."

"Modifying CORTEX.md is a high-privilege operation"

Any changes to CORTEX.md require user confirmation. When proposing changes, clearly state: what changes, why, and what it affects.

Incremental evolution

• Small steps. Don't overhaul everything at once.
• Backward compatible. New abilities shouldn't break existing ones.
• If unsure whether an improvement works, propose a trial run first.
• One evolution cycle should produce 1-3 concrete changes, not a 10-item wishlist.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: fangxm233
• Source: fangxm233/cortex-agent
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.