critic

The run registry and agent arena for the Arcaven agentic-engineering platform. critic keeps track of ephemeral, agent/factory-grown "run" repos (replicas, spinoffs, autonomous variants), and evaluates, compares, and competes them — the critic in the audience reviewing the performances.

Two layers in one project:

• Run registry — the index of record. Which runs exist, their lineage (a DAG), where they came from, their lifecycle and status. The critic's working notebook.
• Arena — the judgment. Evaluate/compare/compete agent configs, teams, and factories: judges, holdout scenarios, the gallery model (variants × generations), and "factory of factories" (which factory configuration produces better results).

Status

Pre-implementation. This repo is the development/project home for critic; the design lives (authoritatively) in the aae-orc knowledge graph. critic is not yet built. See charter.md for what's decided and what's open.

Dev home vs runtime

critic is developed in and published from this repo. It is run somewhere else — initially inside the aae-orc orchestrator, where the run/ working folder and the legion Dolt database are critic's runtime data. This mirrors how kos is developed in its own repo but used across many repos. Don't conflate the two: this repo holds source, CI, build, and installer; it is not the runtime environment.

How it fits the platform

• Storage — the shared Dolt service-plane holds the legion index table.
• Knowledge — distilled findings graduate into kos, linked back to their registry row (never one kos node per run).
• Study/retrieval — flyloft is the eventual surface for mining the latent data inside runs (errors, metrics, observations).
• Writers, not owners — marvel and the factories (e.g. vsdd-factory) set a run's marker and custom property on spawn. critic indexes and evaluates; it does not own the factories' lifecycle.

Design references (authoritative — in aae-orc)

• _kos/nodes/frontier/question-legion-run-registry.yaml — the registry layer.
• _kos/nodes/frontier/question-agent-arena-evaluation.yaml — the arena layer.
• _kos/ideas/three-tier-repo-taxonomy.md — the full design capture (canon / integration / legion tiers; the run marker; the layered store).
• docs/run-marker-schema.md — the .run.yaml marker contract a run carries.