/evolve — Goal-Driven Compounding Loop

Measure what's wrong. Fix the worst thing. Measure again. Compound.

Cadence is pawl-gated, not per-tread (docs/contracts/pawls.md). Each cycle's heavy validation (full council, /validate --mixed, /pre-land-refuters) fires at that cycle's bead-acceptance / merge-to-main pawl — once per bead, not per slice or wave. The per-cycle regression gate (Step 5) and lightweight in-cycle checks are chaos: cheap, run freely, wrong-tolerant between pawls. Do NOT escalate every cycle to a cross-family panel "to be safe" — that re-creates the waterfall the ratchet exists to avoid (--mixed is reserved for strategic decisions; see references/postmortem-checkpoint.md). The bead is fully validated at its acceptance pawl — that is the ratchet's lock.

The loop runs as this skill (skills-are-the-runtime). evolve selects work and invokes complete /rpi --auto cycles — that is the loop. Each cycle's post-mortem checkpoint is a re-plan point, not just stop/continue: it may re-scope, reorder, drop, or add to the remaining queue/goal from what the cycle taught (/rpi's Agile Re-Plan Loop, one altitude up — agile across cycles, not a fixed backlog run to the letter). Substrates dispatch the whole evolve skill loop as one unit through NTM, Agent Mail, or ao agent; the former RPI CLI wrappers are retired under ADR-0009.