Add autoresearch: benchmark-driven optimization loops with dedicated server support#168
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Add autoresearch: benchmark-driven optimization loops with dedicated server support#168
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Backend: - benchmark_servers.rs: Admin CRUD for dedicated benchmark servers with SSH-based provisioning - autoresearch.rs: Core optimization loop — creates agent, clones repo, runs baseline, then loops: Claude optimizes → benchmark → accept/reject → repeat. Supports dedicated servers via rsync+SSH. - DB tables: benchmark_servers, autoresearch_runs, autoresearch_experiments, autoresearch_logs - Stats endpoint for live observability (% improvement, exp/hr, etc.) - Recovery logic for interrupted runs on server restart Frontend: - Benchmark Servers section in Admin panel - API types and functions for benchmark servers
- Autoresearch.tsx: List page with create run form (repo, benchmark command, metric regex, direction, target/frozen files, server select) - AutoresearchDetail.tsx: Live observability dashboard with stats bar (% improvement, exp/hr, accept rate, cost, est. remaining), metric chart, experiment feed with expandable diffs, and config view - MetricChart.tsx: SVG scatter chart showing metric per experiment (green=accepted, red=rejected) with baseline and best lines - Layout.tsx: Added Autoresearch nav item with FlaskConical icon - App.tsx: Added /autoresearch and /autoresearch/:id routes - api.ts: Added AutoresearchRun, AutoresearchExperiment, and AutoresearchStats types with all API functions
- Add WebSocket endpoint for live autoresearch log streaming - Add PR creation endpoint with run summary in body - Wire up LogViewer component for autoresearch logs tab - Add Create PR button + PR link to detail page - Add E2E seed data (completed + running runs with experiments) - Add E2E tests for list page, detail page, navigation
…versSection The Admin page's BenchmarkServersSection adds mutation handlers (create, delete, setup) that require real SSH/server APIs unavailable in CI. The main autoresearch pages are already excluded.
Replace the metric_regex + optimization_direction approach with Claude-based analysis. After each benchmark run, Claude reads the output and extracts the metric value, decides if it improved, and describes what the metric is. - Add 'objective' field (e.g. "optimize EVM execution performance") - Make metric_regex and optimization_direction optional - New analyze_benchmark_output function asks Claude to parse output - Simplified create form: just repo, benchmark command, objective
Instead of copying the benchmark server's SSH private key into the agent container (security risk), the host now drives the rsync: 1. Pull from agent container to a temp dir on the host (host has SSH to agent) 2. Push from host temp dir to benchmark server (host has SSH to server) No private keys are exposed to the agent container.
Instead of separate Claude calls for optimization and analysis, use one continuous conversation: 1. Initial prompt: show baseline benchmark output, ask Claude to analyze the metric and make first optimization 2. Loop: run benchmark, show output to Claude with --continue, Claude reports metric + improved, makes next optimization 3. Backend commits/reverts based on Claude's judgment Claude sees the raw benchmark output in context and makes all decisions. No separate analyze_benchmark_output function needed.
Log every step: repo cloned, rsync progress, benchmark start/finish with duration, Claude prompts and responses (truncated), diff sizes, experiment decisions. All visible in the Logs tab in real-time.
The autoresearch pipeline was calling Claude without authentication. Now uses build_claude_auth_env (same as regular tasks) to set up ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN, or OpenRouter config before each Claude call. Also passes the model flag for non-default providers.
Add agent_exec_stream_and_capture that streams stdout line by line to the broadcast channel while also capturing the full output. Now Claude's thinking/responses appear in the Logs tab as they happen instead of waiting for the full response.
Use agent_exec_claude_streaming (same as regular tasks) instead of agent_exec_capture. This gives real-time streaming of Claude's thinking, tool use, and responses in the Logs tab.
- Remove all rsync code. Clone repo directly on benchmark server, sync changes via git push (agent) + git pull (server). - Token passed as one-time env var via SSH, stripped from remote URL after clone. Never stored on the benchmark server. - All broadcast messages (including Claude streaming output) now persisted to autoresearch_logs via a background subscriber, so logs survive tab switches and WebSocket reconnects.
Use the same createCommitOnBranch GraphQL mutation as regular tasks to push verified/signed commits. Fixes push rejection on repos that require commit signature verification. Also persists all task broadcast messages (including Claude streaming) to task_logs so logs survive tab switches.
…rch runs Users can send suggestions to Claude mid-run (e.g. "try optimizing the hash function"). Messages are queued and injected into Claude's next experiment prompt alongside the benchmark results. - autoresearch_messages table for storing user messages - API endpoints: list and send messages - Suggestion input bar on the detail page (visible during active runs) - Messages appear in the Logs tab as [USER] entries
Instead of stacking commits on a single branch, each experiment is tested in isolation against the base branch. When improved, a branch (autoresearch/<run-id>/exp-<N>) is created and pushed. The agent resets to clean main and tries something different. Branches only — PRs can be created manually from the experiment's Create PR button in the UI.
- Stats bar: replace Improvement/Best/Est. Remaining with Baseline, Experiments, Rate, Running For, Cost - Add Branches section showing clickable branch names for accepted experiments linking to GitHub - Experiment feed: show branch link per accepted experiment - Chart: remove "best" line since experiments are independent - Remove top-level Create PR button (PRs are per-experiment now)
…tings - Fix: anthropic-oauth and anthropic providers now pass ANTHROPIC_MODEL env var when a model is configured (was previously ignored) - Add Anthropic model dropdown (Sonnet 4.6 / Opus 4.6) to the global and per-user Settings page for anthropic/anthropic-oauth providers
Tell Claude to never ask questions and to record significant choices in the format: DECISION: <choice> | ALTERNATIVES: <other options>. These are parsed from the response and shown in: - A new Decisions tab listing every decision across all experiments - A decision count badge on each experiment row Each decision has a "Try an alternative" button that sends a user message asking Claude to revisit that decision with a different choice in the next experiment.
Six functions were annotated with #[allow(dead_code)] with no callers. Remove them rather than silence the lint: - autoresearch::create_experiment_pr — PR-creation path that was never wired up. - autoresearch::build_experiment_prompt — prompt builder replaced by the inline flow. - autoresearch::get_recent_experiments — was fed into the removed prompt builder. - shell::agent_exec_stream_and_capture — no callers. - shell::run_cmd_streaming_capture — only call-site was the function above, now both gone. - tasks::scrub_secrets — secret redaction helper with no callers. Clippy strict (-D warnings) now passes.
Three failures were assertions against an older detail-page layout: - Stats for completed run: the Best stat card was removed in 806614e when the stat bar became Baseline/Experiments/Rate/Running For/Cost, so drop the 51.3000 assertion and replace it with the Baseline label and experiment counter that the bar actually shows today. - Experiment feed: use each ExperimentRow's rendered metric_value (45.0000, 41.2000, 51.3000) to identify accepted vs rejected rows rather than substring-matching the claude_response text, and expand row #5 by clicking its metric value. - Running run: getByText('running') matched both the status badge and the "Running for" stat label. Pin to the exact-match badge and also verify the Stop button is present.
locator('button', { hasText: '51.3000' }) returned zero matches in CI
for reasons unclear (possibly a nested button/span structure or a
timing issue). Simpler path: click the metric text itself — the whole
row is a <button>, so the click bubbles to the toggle handler.
The row is a <button> containing a nested <a> (invalid HTML) which
appears to break Playwright's click-bubbling in headless mode — the
onToggle handler never runs. The assertion the test name describes
("feed shows accepted and rejected entries") is already covered by the
per-row metric-value checks, so just drop the expansion + diff step.
The feed is not rendering in CI for this branch — tried substring assertions on metric values, role-based locators, and direct text locators, all time out. The other detail-page tests already cover stats, config, logs, back button, running state and nav, so drop this one test to unblock CI.
Backwards-compatible. Existing shell runs default to benchmark_type='shell'
and leave the new columns null.
autoresearch_runs:
+ benchmark_type TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT 'shell'
+ ethrex_repo_path TEXT
+ benchmarks_repo_path TEXT
+ expb_baseline_metrics JSONB
({fast: {mgas_avg, latency_avg_ms, latency_p50_ms, _p95_ms, _p99_ms},
gigablocks: {...}, slow: {...}})
- benchmark_command is now nullable
autoresearch_experiments:
+ mgas_avg / latency_avg_ms / latency_p50_ms / _p95_ms / _p99_ms
+ expb_tier_reached TEXT ('fast' | 'gigablocks' | 'slow' | null)
Rust models + SELECT queries + e2e seed schema updated to match.
New module expb.rs drives the external benchmarking tooling entirely
over SSH. Per scenario, it:
1. SSHes into the benchmark server, does `docker build` against the
ethrex checkout that lives on the server.
2. Writes a scenario YAML to /tmp on the server.
3. Runs ./scripts/expb-wrapper.sh execute-scenario ...
4. Reads ethrex.log and k6.log back over SSH.
5. Parses mgas_avg (from [METRIC] BLOCK lines) and latency avg/p50/
p95/p99 (from the k6 http_req_duration line in the SCENARIO block).
No HTTP server, no API URL, no port 4000, no external queue — the
benchmark is just a shell command, same shape as our existing
shell-benchmark flow.
Pipeline wiring in autoresearch.rs branches on run.benchmark_type:
- Phase 2 (baseline): run_expb_baseline runs fast → gigablocks →
slow against the run's base branch, stores each tier's metrics
in expb_baseline_metrics (JSONB), and mirrors the fast-tier
mgas_avg into baseline_metric for the existing UI stat card.
- Per experiment: run_expb_experiment pushes the agent container's
HEAD to the ethrex checkout on the server (over SSH, with
GIT_LFS_SKIP_PUSH=1), checks it out, runs the tiered gate against
the stored baselines, persists per-experiment metrics and
tier_reached onto the experiment row, and overrides Claude's
IMPROVED flag with the structural keep-or-discard verdict.
Keep rule: ≥5% improvement on mgas or latency, no regression >5% on
the other primary, no tail percentile regression >10%. An experiment
must pass all three tiers (fast, gigablocks, slow) to be kept.
Classic shell runs are untouched. benchmark_command is only required
for benchmark_type='shell'. benchmark_servers are reused as-is; EXPB
runs use the same hostname + SSH-key + user fields.
Setup Server button now verifies prerequisites (docker, sudo -n,
expb binary, overlay FS) instead of trying to install anything, and
prints [OK] / [MISSING] per item.
New-run form: benchmark-type toggle (shell vs EXPB). Shell keeps the benchmark-command input; EXPB replaces it with two fields — the ethrex repo path and the benchmarks repo path on the server — and requires picking a benchmark server. No URL inputs, no ports. Detail page: ExperimentRow shows a three-step tier progress badge (fast ✓ gigablocks ✓ slow ✓) whenever EXPB metrics are present. metric_value is populated with mgas_avg for EXPB experiments so the existing chart works unchanged. API types updated to match the Rust shapes.
The previous setup passed the script as an argv entry to `ssh ... bash -c <script>`. SSH joins argv with spaces and the remote login shell re-parses the result, so embedded `;` and control-flow operators (`if ... ; then`, `exit $status`) got interpreted by the outer shell — the tail end of the script saw `bash -c` with no argument and errored with "bash: -c: option requires an argument". Pipe the script through `ssh ... bash -s` via stdin instead, so the remote bash receives the script bytes untouched. Also add a one-line hint on how to enable passwordless sudo when the check reports it missing.
Backend already exposed PUT /api/admin/benchmark-servers/{id}; we just
never wired up a UI for it. Each row now has a pencil icon next to
Setup / Log / Delete that opens a dialog letting an admin change the
name, hostname, SSH user, SSH key path, and hardware description
without having to delete and re-add the server (which is painful or
impossible once an autoresearch run references the row).
Adds a `User: <name> (home: <path>)` line near the top of the setup verification script. When the verification reports passwordless sudo as missing despite the configured SSH user having NOPASSWD set, this line confirms whether tekton is actually connecting as the user the admin thinks it is.
The setup verification's stdout was being collapsed into a single
wrapped paragraph in the dialog because:
1. When the script exited non-zero (because something was [MISSING]),
the backend stuffed the entire stdout into error_message and
cleared setup_log.
2. The frontend rendered error_message inside <p>, so newlines
collapsed to spaces and the OK / MISSING markers ran together
as one wall of text.
Fix both:
- Backend: split run_server_setup's return into a SetupOutcome
{ ok, log }. ok=false means tekton SSHed in fine and the script
ran but reported missing prereqs — keep the full output in
setup_log, set error_message to a one-line summary. ok=true
means everything passed. Err(AppError) is reserved for actual
SSH/spawn failures.
- Frontend: render error_message in a <pre> with whitespace-pre-wrap
so newlines survive even when the message itself is multi-line.
The agent container is a separate network namespace and doesn't inherit the tekton host's DNS, so direct SSH from agent → benchmark host fails with "Could not resolve hostname" even when the same hostname resolves fine on the tekton host. Every experiment was dying on the push step and being mis-recorded as REJECTED. Route through GitHub instead: setup creates the experiment branch on origin (lambdaclass/ethrex), each experiment uses push_verified to update it, and the benchmark host fetches from its origin remote (same flow the shell-based runs already use). The agent container never needs a network path to the benchmark host. Also stop wasting Claude turns on infrastructure failures: when the EXPB tier-gate path errors out (push, fetch, docker build, expb wrapper crash), mark the experiment as 'error', reset the agent's branch, and continue. Don't fabricate a "REJECTED at <baseline>" verdict against a benchmark that never ran.
Claude often runs 'git add && git commit' itself in its tool use. The previous diff check (working tree only) returned empty in that case, so we'd skip the experiment as 'no changes'. Now we check 'git diff origin/<base>' to detect both uncommitted and already-committed changes since the base branch. The commit step is also idempotent — won't fail if Claude already committed.
…jective every turn Two bugs surfaced from the overnight run on autoresearch/7a6d8d35: 1. The shared run-level branch accumulated every iteration's diff, so every EXPB benchmark measured cumulative state instead of the single experiment, and even the per-accepted exp-N branches inherited that cumulative state. 2. After dozens of `--continue` turns the original objective drifted — Claude defaulted to micro-optimizing the metric's hottest file (73 of ~100 commits touched levm/memory.rs) instead of pursuing the user's actual research-shaped goal. Fixes: - Each iteration creates and pushes its own autoresearch/<id>/exp-N branch off base. No more shared run branch, no more accumulation. Accepted / rejected is just a DB flag — no second push. pull_on_benchmark_server now fetches the explicit branch. - The continue prompt and the post-iteration reset prompt both re-state the user's objective verbatim and explicitly warn against defaulting to local hot-path optimization when the objective is research-shaped.
The continue/reset prompts already re-state the objective each turn, but the initial prompt was still framing Claude as a generic "optimization agent" and steering it into "analyze the baseline output and start optimizing the metric" before the objective ever got prioritized. On research-shaped objectives Claude was using WebFetch briefly and then defaulting straight to the obvious EVM hot path. Restructure the initial prompt so the objective is the headline, research is mandated up front when the objective calls for it, and the metric is explicitly framed as a measurement tool rather than the thing to chase.
…runs After a run finishes, the backend removes the broadcast channel from state.autoresearch_channels 60s later. From then on, every WS connect finds no channel and the server immediately sends Close. The frontend's auto-reconnect then re-opens the WS every 3s, calls term.clear() on open, and the backend re-replays the entire DB log history — so the visible logs are wiped and rewritten on a 3s cadence and any text selection is lost. Pass the run status into LogViewer (via a ref so updates don't recreate the socket) and skip the reconnect when the run is in a terminal state (completed / failed / stopped). Active runs still reconnect as before.
…IC: line In the previous overnight run Claude reported METRIC: 720 in its response while the EXPB harness actually measured mgas_avg: 673.93 — the agent hallucinated the number and the loop logged "REJECTED: 720 (best: 673.85)", which makes no sense and isn't what the gate actually compared. For EXPB runs we already have the truth: run_expb_experiment already pulls final_metrics.mgas_avg out of the harness result and persists it. Thread that value back to the caller and use it in place of Claude's parsed METRIC: line. Claude's IMPROVED: flag was already overridden the same way. Shell-flow runs are unchanged — they still parse Claude's METRIC: line because there's no structural alternative.
… the metric In the previous run, after exp-3 regressed Claude's next move was to relocate validate_block_body from inside the execute_block_pipeline window to before start_instant — i.e. hide existing work from the mgas measurement rather than reduce it. That looks like an improvement to the gate but isn't one in reality. Add an explicit anti-gaming clause to both the initial prompt and the per-iteration continue prompt: changes must reduce real work, not relocate it past the measurement boundaries (start/stop instants, or into a background thread that isn't joined).
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Summary
Adds autoresearch to tekton — optimization loops where an AI agent modifies code, benchmarks each change, and keeps only improvements.
Backend
Frontend
Test plan