Alembic distills the world into verified Signals and Learnings and runs ventures across a model swarm. With the Hermes fusion it finally remembers what it learned — every run sediments validated lessons that make the next run smarter.
Alembic had two of the three pieces a self-improving system needs — it could ingest the world and distill it into value. It was missing the third: nothing read its Learnings back to change how the next run reasoned. A lesson learned in run N was invisible to run N+1.
The Learnings store filled up, but nothing fed it back into the engine. Each run started cold.
The Hermes loop slots into machinery Alembic already had — a Validator-gated return path that sediments only validated wins.
Hermes auto-wrote to its memory. Alembic changed the one thing that matters for an engine: the reviewer proposes, the existing Validator disposes. Nothing sediments without clearing the quality floor (ADR-0018, default scoreThresholdGate(0.7)).
The fusion lives in @alembic/hermes, depending only on contracts + etl — the bottom of the dependency graph. Each obeys the engine's invariants: typed Result at every boundary, FsPort for IO, no throws in library code.
Frozen-snapshot curated memory, injected at session start so mid-session writes never invalidate the prompt cache.
The closed loop, reshaped to propose → gate → dispose. The differentiator.
A blocking human-in-the-loop gateway — the T4 park can now pose a concrete question and wait.
web_search / web_extract over an injected backend, with optional LLM content compression.
An FsPort skill store — tiered list / view + CRUD, with path safety and a dep-free frontmatter parser.
A deterministic active→stale→archived lifecycle over agent-created skills. Never deletes.
transcribe / analyzeImage over injected cloud backends, so audio + image sources enter the funnel.
The engine fails closed. The whole suite — typecheck, build, test, and the impeccable design gate — is the baseline every change must keep at exit 0.
$ pnpm -r typecheck && pnpm -r build && pnpm -w test › @alembic/contracts typecheck ✓ build ✓ › @alembic/hermes typecheck ✓ build ✓ 7 subsystems › test files 63 passed cases 565 passed (0 failed) $ npx impeccable detect docs/ ✓ 0 findings — design gate clean
Per ADR-0001 the engine is internal infrastructure. The capability set flows to the products and ventures that sit on it — and, uniquely, to the engine itself.
The engine stops being something the ventures call and becomes something that gets better the more it is used.