burtenshaw/agent-handover-august-2026

Agent handover: August 2026

This is the public evidence catalogue for a daily August series about small, reproducible agent-training experiments. The experiments were run before the social posts were scheduled. The posting agent selects one prepared story each day, reviews replies, and may change the order without changing the underlying claims.

The ten studies were ranked for:

1. strength of the measured result;
2. relevance to agent training and post-training;
3. reproducibility from public code, data, metrics, and model artifacts;
4. pedagogical surprise, including controlled negative results;
5. honesty about the gap between a training metric and task success.

Selected experiments

Rank	Experiment	Result	Release state
1	OpenEnv ECHO with LFM2.5-350M, three seeds	Held-out environment-token CE fell from 13.741 to 0.413 for seed 0; token accuracy reached 0.857	Public models and Trackio
2	Qwen3-0.6B MBPP SFT	Extracted MBPP accuracy rose from 0.2607 to 0.3852	Public adapter and Trackio
3	LFM2.5-350M CommonsenseQA SFT	Full validation accuracy rose from 249/1221 to 308/1221	Public adapter and Trackio
4	BrowserGym tool-call training	Reward moved from 0 to 1 on one MiniWoB click-test task	Public adapter and Trackio; deliberately scoped
5	Toolcalc SFT versus GRPO	SFT reached 0.50 exact-answer success while three GRPO variants stayed at 0	Controlled negative result
6	Tinker ECHO preflight and local fallback	Held-out CE fell from 6.182 to 0.271 in the verified fallback	Reproducible report; remote Tinker path was not run
7	Qwen/Gemma on-policy GKD	Qwen valid-command rate improved while strict proxy success stayed 1/4	Controlled negative result
8	QLoRA SFT loss versus behavior	Eval loss improved from 2.5109 to 2.1916 while a behavior probe worsened	Controlled metric/behavior mismatch
9	Gemma Pi-Mono transfer	HumanEval improved while MBPP regressed from 0.716 to 0.651	Controlled specialization result
10	Agent World Model session stress	24/24 sessions and 48/48 tool turns completed; reset p90 was 13.226s	Environment reliability study

Detailed claims, limitations, reproduction pointers, model links, and dashboard links are in experiments/README.md. Machine-readable records are in data/experiments.json. The prepared social queue is published up front in data/posts.json. All public artifacts are grouped in the Agent Handover: August 2026 collection.

Campaign dashboard

The comparison dashboard is burtenshaw/agent-handover-trackio. Runs named historical-* are explicit replays of already-verified metric JSON; their timestamps are not the original training timestamps. Original dashboards remain linked from the experiment records.

Claim policy

• A training loss or reward is never presented as agent task success.
• Negative and inconclusive results remain negative and inconclusive.
• Private checkpoints are not described as public models.
• A result without a held-out evaluation is explicitly scoped as a smoke test.
• The publisher refuses posts outside 12-31 August 2026 or duplicate daily posts, and defaults to dry-run mode until X credentials and live posting are explicitly enabled.

Automation

The transparent publisher and reply-review worker are in automation/publisher.py. It uses the official X API, stores raw replies only in a private control repository, never replies automatically, and uses reply keyword overlap only to reorder future prepared posts. The public claims in this repository are immutable inputs to that editorial process.

The three Hugging Face schedules were created suspended. This public release does not imply that X posting is active; activation requires account-owner OAuth credentials and an explicit switch from dry-run to live mode.