evograph — DEPRECATED

Do not select algorithm_skill: evograph for a new run. Use agent-optimize (agent mode) or hill-climb / gepa / skillopt (deterministic) with memory_skill: wiki if you want THIS run's weakness-graph format. This file stays so an existing evograph run dir is still readable.

Why it is deprecated

evograph advertised one distinctive capability — a collaborative weakness graph with one solver agent per weakness, merged into a shared candidate each round. Measured against its four siblings, that capability is not distinctive and the part that was distinctive was a defect:

• The fan-out already exists, gated properly. agent-optimize fans out N sibling candidates from the same parent, one diagnosed failure cluster each, every sibling in its own working copy (a git worktree when the capability is in git), gated one at a time with a re-gate after each accept so several fixes accumulate into one lineage honestly. That is evograph's round, minus the flaws below. The clustering itself is phases/diagnose's job in both cases.
• Acceptance was never held out. evograph kept a merge on a raw delta over a frozen 3-task subset of train, self-reported by the solver subagent that made the edit — no val split, no standard error, no Δ > k·SE. Between baseline and finalize an evograph run took no held-out measurement at all, so the sealed test number was the first honest signal anyone saw. Whole-round revert existed only as a one-round-late substitute for the gate it lacked; wire the real gate and there is nothing left for it to catch.
• What remains unique is an output format, not a search strategy. The run-dir wiki/ is genuinely useful, but the dashboard renders the Weakness-graph tab from wiki/ presence alone, for any algorithm that writes the format (core/cap_evolve/dashboard.py). An output contract does not earn a second agent-mode algorithm that users must choose between — it has since moved to skills/memory/wiki/SKILL.md, a standalone memory_skill any algorithm can select (#400, #404), so it no longer needs evograph to stay alive.

There is no deterministic engine

There never was one, and scripts/run.py is a tombstone, not a stub: invoked deterministically it exits 2 with an agent-mode only payload rather than faking a loop. So evograph is also the one algorithm that could not be routed through the shared per-iteration record — see the hill-climb skill's references/run-step.md, which owns the shared iteration mechanics (parent selection, val gate, commit, iteration record) every other algorithm routes through. Read it if you are reconstructing what an evograph round should have done.

Reading an existing evograph run

The run dir is authoritative. <run_dir>/wiki/ holds the weakness nodes, solution cards and per-round results; <run_dir>/runs/round-<N>/agents/<slug>.log holds solver progress. The formats are in references/dashboard.md — load it if you need to write or parse that wiki. Treat any per-weakness "kept / new record" number in it as a train-subset self-report, not a gated result; only finalize's sealed test number and any gate decision recorded in events.jsonl are honest.

scripts/now.py is the one-clock timestamp stamper those formats require; it is correct and still used by anything writing the wiki.

Removal is a separate decision

Deprecation is reversible; removal is not. The wiki format contract now has a real owner (skills/memory/wiki/SKILL.md), so what's left to decide (maintainer): stop dashboard.py inferring algorithm = "evograph" from wiki/ presence alone (any memory_skill: wiki run now writes it too), then delete this directory.

References

• skills/memory/wiki/SKILL.md — the wiki format contract's current home: weakness-node/solution-card schemas, generalized for any algorithm via memory_skill: wiki.
• references/dashboard.md — the same file formats, kept here for reading an existing evograph run dir's branch/round-revert specifics the generalized skill dropped.
• references/clustering.md — weakness-node schema and the affected_tasks freeze rule, kept for reading historical run dirs.
• references/graph.md — solution-card schema, branch layout, whole-round revert, kept for the same reason.