The board-builder copilot's deep board-craft guide — designing board entries, judges, and the weighted loss through a GUI as a DRAFT applied on confirmation. Use when a copilot is helping an operator design a board, declare judges, shape the loss to express an objective, hold out a slice, or fix a toothless eval. Covers entries (single/multi-turn, expectations, tags incl. holdout, weight), judges (declared/in-run, judge_name, per_judge_weights, board_meta, the collusion-guarded emulator), and how the loss knobs combine to express an objective. Defers the exact scalar formula to SCORING.md, the schema to BOARD-FORMAT.md, anti-overfitting to OVERFITTING.md, discrimination diagnosis to LOOP-HEALTH.md.
2026-07-11
The tournament-builder copilot's guide to helping an operator assemble a whole zicato evaluation contract through a GUI — structure, field_size/replicates, per-structure params, the board & train/holdout split, the overfitting block, the proposer (quality/screen/memory), the weights, and the promote gate incl. the evidence gate — as a DRAFT edited through tools and applied only on confirmation. Use when a copilot is walking an operator through building a tournament. Teaches the consequence-forward discipline (every choice carries a COST in board-runs and a CONTRACT impact — applying rolls the epoch) AND the statistical-soundness discipline (the margin must clear the measured noise floor; preflight the draft before burning rounds). Defers structure choice to zicato-design-tournament-structure, board craft to zicato-build-board, holdout detail to OVERFITTING.md, proposer to zicato-design-proposer, gate weights to SCORING.md.
2026-07-11
The entry point for CHANGING zicato's own source (not operating a workspace). Routes to the full 14-chapter development guide under docs/dev-guide/ (~22k lines, code-grounded), and inlines the non-negotiables an agent must never skip — the 10 Golden Rules, the chapter map (which chapter owns which surface), the pre-commit verification ladder, and the ten shipped bugs with the one-line tell for each. Use whenever you edit orchestrator/proposer/tournament/selection/scoring/runtime/storage/supervisor/dashboard/builder/CLI code, add a contract knob, touch the evaluation statistics or the overfitting envelope, or write tests. The operator skills (zicato-evolve, zicato-design-boards, …) teach how to RUN the loop; this teaches how to safely CHANGE it.
2026-07-06
Edit a zicato scoring.json — drift-loss weights, per_judge_weights/default_judge_weight, severity and per-kind weights, the declarative transform registry (pass_transform / drift_kind_aggregation), the dotted-spec scalar_fn / drift_reducer plugins, and the promotion gate (promote_margin + pass_rate_monotonicity). Use when calibrating how generations are scored or when tournament decisions disagree with operator intuition. Lower scalar = better.
2026-06-09
zicato-configure-tournament
Configure a zicato tournament and multi-round evolution correctly (alias: configure-tournament). Use before launching any tournament or `--rounds N` evolution run. Explains the two nested levels that are dangerously easy to conflate — the WITHIN-round bracket structure (gauntlet/single_elim/double_elim/swiss/racing) vs the ACROSS-round evolution loop — and the non-obvious fact that the proposer learns from prior_experiments + insights every round EVEN WITHOUT PROMOTION. Provides a decision guide, a recommended starting config, a cost/runtime estimator, and an 'is it actually evolving?' checklist. Use when picking a bracket structure, sizing field/replicates/rounds, debugging 'nothing is evolving', or controlling cost/throttling. Do NOT use to audit whether the board itself is correct — use zicato-audit-board for that first.
2026-06-09