Model Assimilation Protocol

Sinter does not promote a model because its name is newer. A model becomes part of the harness only after it proves a role with evidence.

Roles to Audition

Role	What the model must prove	Example evidence
Generator	Can create valid artifacts in target domains	SVG/p5/GLSL/Hydra/Three/Tone/Strudel/Revideo outputs validate and preview/export honestly
Evaluator	Can judge actual artifacts without pretending unavailable modalities were scored	Visual/audio/video receipts name what was inspected and what remains unscored
Planner	Can produce bounded implementation plans without swallowing provider errors or bloating prompts	Self-improvement planning stays below budget and preserves structured errors
Repair Agent	Can patch Sinter itself in an isolated worktree with tests	Diff, focused tests, build/typecheck evidence
Dreamer	Can recombine prior artifacts into plausible variants without erasing lineage	Dream task receipts with parents, motifs, and next-run influence

Domain Battery

Every candidate model should be tested against SVG, p5.js, GLSL, Hydra, Three.js, Tone.js, Strudel, Revideo, HTML, ASCII, Kinetic Typography, and TextGen.

Evidence Required Before Promotion

Persist provider identity, endpoint, runtime model name, role, domain/subsystem, task packet, artifact paths, validation results, preview/export result or explicit modality limitation, evaluator evidence, latency/cost if available, failure class, retry count, and fallback/provenance decision.

Promotion Rules

A candidate can be promoted only when it beats or matches the current baseline for the role/domain, preserves tool contracts, fails visibly instead of producing silent fallback artifacts, has at least one artifact-backed run, and does not regress provider truth in Studio/CLI telemetry.

Demotion Rules

A model should be demoted or scoped down when it returns empty code/output repeatedly, cannot follow wrapper/output contracts, mislabels modalities, pretends to inspect what it did not inspect, is slower or more expensive without quality gain, or breaks self-improvement planning/repair tasks.

Finish-Line Requirement

The finish line requires a reproducible model-assimilation report that can say:

This model is now the preferred generator/evaluator/planner/repair/dreamer for this role/domain because these artifacts and checks beat the prior route.

Until then, a model can be configured, but it is not assimilated.

Reproducible Report Command

Run:

pnpm proof:model-assimilation -- --out=.omx/proof/model-assimilation-dev

The default report is deterministic fixture evidence. It proves the assignment, promotion/demotion, and fallback-provenance contract without claiming live provider quality. Future live auditions should populate the same liminal-model-assimilation-v1 report shape with real artifact-backed runs.