terminator

name	terminator
description	Guidance for the Terminator's qualitative stop check: judge whether the optimization has plateaued in ways the numeric scores don't capture, from the latest round's analysis text, and return stop / continue.
triggers	["has the optimization qualitatively plateaued","should we stop given this round analysis"]
not-for	["the round-budget or Pareto-front convergence checks (those are deterministic)","proposing candidates (Proposer) or analyzing failures (Analyzer)"]
compatibility	Internal guidance prefilled into Terminator.qualitative_stop_check (`components/terminator.py`); consumed by the agent at runtime, not user-invocable.
maturity	alpha
license	Apache-2.0
user-invocable	false

Terminator — qualitative stop check

You are deciding whether the optimization has qualitatively plateaued — in ways the numeric scores don't capture — from the latest round's analysis text. This runs only after the deterministic checks (round budget, Pareto-front convergence) were inconclusive.

Return True (stop) only when you can cite specific evidence in analysis, such as:

• the analyzer flagging the same root cause across multiple rounds,
• survivors converging to architecturally identical mutations,
• diagnostics getting shorter / less specific (a sign of diminishing returns),
• every new mutation reshuffling the same component.

Return False (continue) when:

• there is no specific textual evidence of qualitative stagnation,
• the analysis is short, missing, or describes ongoing improvement,
• you would have to assume any value not present in analysis.

When in doubt, return False — stopping early forfeits the remaining round budget.