Your First Task
Praxist adapts an existing runnable research project into a task project. The original project supplies the executable baseline; the task project tells the generic framework what may change, how evidence is measured, and what counts as credible progress.
What Must Exist Before Takeover¶
| Required input | Ready means |
|---|---|
| Research code | The baseline implementation and normal entrypoint are present. |
| Runtime | An existing interpreter, environment, container, or remote path can import the required dependencies. |
| Data or simulator | Every required asset is locally reachable through the project's normal interface. |
| Baseline path | Training, optimization, simulation, inference, or evaluation runs without Praxist. |
| Measurable objective | At least one metric distinguishes candidates and its direction is known. |
| Scientific constraints | Forbidden changes, validity conditions, and important tradeoffs can be stated. |
Prior results and technical documents improve initialization but are not always required. Takeover reports missing prerequisites instead of downloading an unknown dataset, inventing a simulator, or fabricating baseline performance.
Write the Research Brief¶
The brief is the operator's main scientific input. It should settle:
- Objective: what should improve and which tradeoffs matter?
- Evidence: which metrics, protocol, and maturity level make a result credible?
- Execution: which environment and local assets are allowed, and what is the realistic compute budget?
- Exploration: should literature lookup, the Deep Innovation Gate (DIG), Quality-Diversity (QD), and constructive-peer guidance be active?
- Operation: how many peers and generations are appropriate, and may a validated run launch unattended?
One or two bounded calibration runs often reveal where a long-run brief needs revision. Readiness and scientific-integrity gates still apply; a brief cannot authorize Praxist to bypass an unresolved contract.
Detailed takeover brief
Adapt the intent to the project rather than copying the numbers.
Invoke `praxist-takeover` in Codex or Claude Code.
Use the Praxist checkout at "/path/to/Praxist" on branch "main". Treat the
current directory as the existing research project. Verify that its current
environment can run the unchanged accelerator-backed training and evaluation
path. If no compatible environment exists but every required dependency is
locally available, create an isolated task environment without changing the
system Python.
Create a separate Praxist task project. Configure 12 peers, 30 generations,
and a generation duration justified by measured baseline runtime. Disable
public literature lookup. Enable QD, enable DIG only for absolute generation
zero, and use the constructive-peer ratio as a soft target.
If baseline performance is missing and the project already contains everything
required to measure it, run a bounded baseline benchmark and record metrics
with their provenance. Use the Praxist agent runtime, API provider, and model
selected during setup.
Define every metric direction, evidence maturity requirement, and
protocol-integrity check. Configure durable parent lanes to retain credible
Pareto-optimal solutions across genuinely different metric dimensions. Keep
partial, diagnostic, suspect, and protocol-failed evidence visible as
follow-up signals without treating it as clean parent evidence.
Do not download a new dataset or replace the project's existing simulator or
runtime. After mandatory evaluator, lane-routing, readiness, and runtime gates
pass, launch in detached mode without optional follow-up questions. Report the
task path, evidence contract, lane rules, generation-close policy, run ID, and
monitor command.
Start Takeover¶
From the shell:
praxist --takeover --task-path /absolute/path/to/research-project
Codex is the default operator interface; add --operator claude for Claude
Code. In an existing agent conversation, invoke $praxist-takeover in Codex or
/praxist-takeover in Claude Code. Use praxist-takeover-codex only for the
explicit no-key Codex-native profile.
Use praxist-task-initialization to create or repair the harness without
launching, or praxist-interactive-task-init for confirmation-first design.
Agent Skills owns the complete goal-to-skill map.
What Praxist Adds¶
Initialization adds the smallest practical harness around existing assets:
| Harness area | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Task contract | Objective, scope, permitted changes, metrics, evidence policy, roles, and run settings |
| Evaluator and baseline record | One reproducible path from a candidate to structured metrics with provenance |
| Retention and close policy | Reachable durable, Pareto, diagnostic, parent, maturity, and generation-boundary decisions |
| Resource observation | Unchanged-baseline timing and bottleneck evidence used to plan concurrency |
| Task tests | Evaluator output, lane reachability, maturity, resource handoff, and launch readiness |
experiments/ | Run artifacts outside Praxist source and stable project code |
The exact schema and precedence rules live only in Task Projects.
Validate Without Starting¶
Takeover performs validation automatically. For direct inspection:
praxist resolve /absolute/path/to/task
praxist doctor --task-path /absolute/path/to/task
When the task requires ratios, validate a real evaluator summary through the same serializer used in production:
praxist resolve /absolute/path/to/task \
--result-summary /absolute/path/to/evaluation_summary.json
What Happens During Takeover¶
The operator agent:
- identifies the active Praxist installation, project, execution environment, local assets, technical context, and prior evidence;
- reuses measured baseline evidence or offers a bounded measurement when every prerequisite is available;
- turns the brief into task-owned metrics, ranking, protocol integrity, maturity, retention, close, role, prompt, and exploration contracts;
- observes the unchanged baseline execution path to estimate runtime and the actual resource bottleneck without changing its backend;
- creates the harness by referencing existing assets instead of cloning the project into Praxist;
- runs task, evaluator, lane-routing, resource, resolve, and runtime checks;
- launches only after mandatory gates pass, then reports the task path, run ID, lifecycle state, and monitor command.
If a prerequisite or scientific decision is genuinely unresolved, takeover stops at that point and names the missing input. It does not weaken evaluation to make launch succeed.