shojin

Shōjin (精進): sustained, diligent effort toward improvement — the Japanese rendering of vīrya-pāramitā, and the everyday phrase (精進します) for "I will keep getting better." Investigations into whether and how AI agents improve themselves, run on hgym. The framework lives there; the science lives here.

Findings so far

• Claude Code self-improved on business workflows through conversation, not memories (post, replication package) — told only to get better, Claude Code raised held-out success from 34% to 48% and built itself a directed knowledge base along the way. Held-out ablations locate the improvement in the conversation: the compaction summary carries most of it at less than a hundredth of the size, the memory notes add nothing measurable across nine comparisons, and stripping thought content changes nothing but the price.

Registrations

Pre-registered designs live in registrations/. A study is registered when its file merges without the DRAFT banner; every later change is a commit, so the freeze is git history itself.

• Generation effect — DRAFT — does the act of writing memory notes contribute, independent of the notes ever being read?

Studies

Each study directory is self-contained: data, stdlib-only analysis, the as-run pipeline, provenance, and a re-run path pinning the hgym commit it targets.

• studies/conversation-not-memories/ — replication package for the published study (in preparation)