Better file viewing. A patch validation step before submitting a fix. Generating several candidate solutions and ranking them instead of shipping the first one. Keeping a running history of what was tried before and why it failed.
Read that list again and tell me who wrote it. It looks like the onboarding checklist a senior engineer hands a new hire. It is not. It is what a coding agent wrote into its own codebase, unprompted, over roughly eighty iterations, while nobody was watching. The agent is the Darwin Gödel Machine from Sakana and Jeff Clune’s lab, and doing this took it from 20 to 50 percent on SWE-bench and from 14 to 31 percent on Polyglot. The list is the finding.
In Part 1 of this series I said the robot-with-a-screwdriver picture of recursive self-improvement was unhelpful. This is the essay where I take it back a little. The robot exists. It just turns out to be a mechanic, not a god, and watching it work is more instructive than any of the arguments were.