A tiny Darwin Gödel Machine that edits itself and keeps only changes that verifiably score higher.
TL;DR: I built a small program that improves itself. It looks at the tasks it's failing, edits its own code to fix them, and keeps a change only if the change actually makes it score better on a test. It goes from passing 1 of 8 tasks to 8 of 8 — and nobody wrote those fixes but the program itself. It runs on a laptop in under a second. No fancy hardware, no API key.
The old dream: software that improves itself
Normally, software only gets better when we make it better. You write code, you find a bug, you fix it, you ship again. The program never improves on its own.
People have wanted "software that improves itself" for decades. The classic version (called a "Gödel Machine") had one rule that made it impossible to build: before the program could change a line of its own code, it had to mathematically prove the change would help. Proving that about real code is basically impossible, so the idea never worked.
