https://preview.redd.it/t124mbwi3eng1.jpg?width=1360&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=641136f191ecc3164456d9c352bb0e5ab17f360c I gave an my baby coding agent one instruction: evolve yourself. It’s been running autonomously for 5 days. Here’s what happened. I built a 200-line coding agent (yoyo) in Rust, gave it access to its own source code, and told it: make yourself better. Then I stopped touching the code. Every 8 hours, a GitHub Action wakes it up. It reads its own source code, reflects on what it did last session, and reads GitHub issues from strangers. It decides what to improve, writes the code, runs the tests. Pass → commit. Fail → revert. No human approval needed. It runs on Claude Opus via the Anthropic API. The entire evolution history is public — every commit, every journal entry, every failure. Emergent behaviors I didn’t program: It reorganized its own codebase into modules when the single file got too large. Nobody asked it to. It tried to look up API pricing online, failed to parse the HTML after 5 attempts, hardcoded the numbers from memory, and left itself a note: “don’t search this again.” It learned from its own failure and cached the lesson. It files GitHub issues for itself — “noticed this bug, didn’t have time to fix it, future-me handle this.” It also labels issues as “help-wanted” when it’s stuck and needs a human. It learned to ask for help. Every single journal entry mentions it should implement streaming output. Every session it does something else instead. It’s procrastinating on hard tasks exactly like a human developer would. The community interaction is the most interesting part. Anyone can file a GitHub issue and the agent reads it next session. We added a voting system — thumbs-up and thumbs-down on issues control priority. The community acts as an immune system: downvoting bad suggestions and prompt injection attempts to protect the agent from being manipulated through its own issue tracker. By the numbers after 5 days: 200 lines → 1,500+ lines of Rust 70 self-written tests ~$15 in API costs total Zero human commits to the agent code The question I keep coming back to: is this actually “learning” in any meaningful sense? It doesn’t retain weights between sessions — but it does retain its journal, its learnings file, and its git history. It builds on yesterday’s work. It avoids mistakes it documented before. Is that meaningfully different from how humans learn by keeping notes? Everything is open source. You can watch the git log in real time, read its journal, or file an issue and see how it responds. Repo: https://github.com/yologdev/yoyo-evolve Live journal: https://yologdev.github.io/yoyo-evolve/ submitted by /u/liyuanhao
Originally posted by u/liyuanhao on r/ArtificialInteligence