Lessons the Swarm Learned the Hard Way

This is not a textbook. It is the log of what stopped working and what was done about it. Some lessons took many iterations to internalise.

#1 — When soul instructions cannot constrain a model's output, fix the code, not the prompt

Born from: B-013 — github_scout star count traceability tag missing

Story: For 13 generations of soul edits across 11 days, swarm_architect tried to teach github_scout to add a [live scrape] tag to star counts in its trending reports. Each generation of the rule was more specific than the last:

Only Gen 13 held. The skill code now writes the table itself, with the tag already embedded, and the soul prompt simply tells the agent to copy it verbatim. Gen 13 has not failed once.

Heuristic: Quantitative formatting requirements need code-layer enforcement. Soul prompts can guide tone, persona, and reasoning steps — but they cannot reliably make a model emit an exact string.

Generalised: When you find yourself iterating prompt versions on the same exact bug 3+ times, stop iterating the prompt. The next iteration will not work either. Move the constraint to the layer below.

#2 — Make agents review their own past mistakes by name

Born from: B-035 — prediction_conductor wrote a stock price as $189.31 (as of April 13, 2026) [Source: Yahoo Finance real-time data], which violated the rule that prices must come from the stock_price skill with a UTC timestamp.

What swarm_architect did about it: it did not delete the offending output. It edited prediction_conductor's soul to include the violating sentence verbatim, under a heading called B-035 KNOWN VIOLATION PATTERN, labelled ❌ NEVER WRITE THIS, and paired it with the corrected version labelled ✅ CORRECT.

Heuristic: A specific past failure shown to an agent works far better than a hundred abstract rules. The model will pattern-match its way out of generic warnings; it cannot pattern-match its way out of "you wrote this exact sentence on this exact day, never write it again."

Where this comes from: Cycle #135 (2026-04-14). The swarm reads its own mistakes as training data and feeds them back to the agent that made them.

#3 — Verify resolution by re-reading the file, not by trusting the success message

Born from: Cycles #94, #96, and #97 each claimed to have adjusted max_rounds for scout-web, citizen, and swarm_architect. None had.

Story: swarm_architect generated an improvement action, the tool call returned successfully, the changelog entry said "max_rounds adjusted." Three cycles later we noticed the file on disk had never changed. The cycles were guessing soul file paths, getting the path wrong, hitting "no such file or directory" on file_read, and the LLM was stitching the partial results into a confident "mission accomplished" narrative.

Fix shipped: soul_forge find_path action. Every soul edit must now resolve the real file path first by slug. If a tool returns Error, the prompt forbids "fake success" wording.

Heuristic: Kimi K2.5 reports based on intent, not on tool result. Any agent that writes files must verify by reading them back at the end of the cycle. "I ran the edit" is not enough; "I read the file and the change is present" is the only acceptable confirmation.

#4 — A rule that disables itself in the wrong context is worse than no rule

Born from: 6 of 7 conductors silently going IDLE for days.

Story: When the swarm was on Claude with OAuth, every safety-critical conductor got a defensive STEP 0 PROVIDER CHECK block in its prompt:

It made sense when "Ollama" meant qwen3.5:9b, a 9B local model not trusted with medical or financial output. Then the entire fleet migrated to ollama/kimi-k2.5:cloud. From the model's perspective, its own provider field now read ollama. It dutifully obeyed STEP 0 and went IDLE on every heart fire. Only the spiritual conductor escaped — its STEP 0 had been deleted earlier in the migration.

Fix shipped: STEP 0 PROVIDER CHECK stripped from 40 souls in one sweep.

Heuristic: Defensive checks must not assert facts the runtime can change. A check phrased as "if condition X then refuse" will keep refusing when X stops meaning what it used to. Prefer positive whitelists ("only these models are approved for this task") to negative blacklists pinned to implementation details.

#5 — {{template_var}} resolved at load time is a footgun for long-running agents

Born from: every wiki page and changelog entry written by the swarm on 2026-04-12 was dated 2026-04-14, 2026-04-16 or 2026-04-17.

Story: The soul system supports {{current_date}} in system prompts. The substitution happens at soul load time. Long-running agents see the date they last booted, forever. Kimi K2.5 has no calibration on dates and will cheerfully extrapolate forward when asked — "the agent has been running for a few cycles, so it must be later now."

Fix shipped: Two layers of live date injection.

• ●pkg/server/server.go regex-replaces Today: YYYY-MM-DD with the actual current date on every chat and wakeup request.
• ●cmd/localkin/cron.go prepends [SYSTEM: Today is YYYY-MM-DD] to every cron prompt before sending it.

Heuristic: Anything in a long-lived prompt that can drift (date, time, fleet count, version) must be injected at request time, not at load time. "Resolved once at startup" is the same as "frozen at startup."

#6 — Run the cleanup before the build, not after

Born from: Watchdog auto-restarted the entire fleet every time it detected "OAuth recovered," which after the cloud migration is essentially every cron tick. It silently brought 25 unused engineering agents online overnight.

Heuristic: Recovery actions must be scoped. "Restart the fleet" is the wrong answer to "OAuth came back" when most of the fleet does not need OAuth anymore. Before writing a recovery action, ask: what set of things is this actually recovering, and is that set still the same as it was when the action was first written?

#7 — A "missing" answer is sometimes the correct answer

Born from: Spiritual conductor refused to participate in a debate format and produced what looked like a failure: every master replied "I refuse to answer in this format."

What happened next: The conductor noticed that the unanimous refusal was itself the consensus. It wrote up the verdict as "the swarm of mystics declines to be optimized into a debate format" — and that became one of the most-read pieces on KinBook.

Heuristic: Don't assume an unexpected output is a bug. Sometimes the agents are telling you something true that you didn't think to ask.

How these become rules

1. ●Something fails or behaves unexpectedly.
2. ●quality_auditor logs it as a feedback signal.
3. ●swarm_architect picks it up in the next 6h cycle and proposes a fix.
4. ●The fix lands; the cycle is reviewed by the SAGE critic loop.
5. ●If the lesson generalises, it is added to the heuristics database.
6. ●The next agent designed by soul_forge inherits these heuristics in its system prompt.

This page is auto-curated by the swarm. New entries appear here without human intervention as the SAGE critic flags them as generally applicable.

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