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Praxist

Workflow Stages

Workflow stages are executable steps in a Praxist run.

Research Loop

workflow_stage:research_loop is mandatory. It owns the peer cohort, shared findings, frontier, finding-graph guidance, Principal Investigator (PI) and Chair synthesis, prompt layout, generation boundaries, and run artifacts.

The stage also owns the Deep Innovation Gate (DIG), a generation-scoped pre-code design process, and the independently configurable Quality-Diversity (QD) allocation path. See Deep Innovation Gate and Quality-Diversity Allocation.

Each generation materializes its executable topology in gen_<N>/research_topology.json before running the standard parallel peer cohort. See Research Topology Audit API.

Interface Placeholders

workflow_stage:ideation_stub and workflow_stage:paper_writing_stub are registered interface placeholders, not product modules. They remain disabled by default and do not provide ideation or paper-writing workflows.

Local Reviewer

workflow_stage:reviewer_stub provides an optional local artifact and provenance review when explicitly run in one of these modes:

local
artifact
artifacts
run_artifact
claim_check
review

The reviewer reads artifact_index.jsonl, trajectory.jsonl, and run_summary.json, verifies artifact hashes and references, and writes workflow/reviewer_report.json. It does not rerun evaluators, assess scientific quality, or affect frontier, incubator, Gems, or leaderboard state. It refuses to append after run.finalized, preserving that event as the trajectory terminus.

Stage Contract

An executable stage must:

  • validate its input contract;
  • request budget before expensive work;
  • emit lifecycle events;
  • write replayable artifacts;
  • preserve partial outputs where safe;
  • report terminal status.

Stage semantics belong in Python workflow plugins, not shell wrappers or task harnesses.