Operator categories
A breeding lab needs a constrained operator catalog. Operators define what kinds of changes are admissible. Without a catalog, every candidate becomes a special case, and governance becomes informal.
| Operator | Domain | Output | Primary evaluator |
|---|---|---|---|
| fine-tune | model | task specialist | task + drift suite |
| adapter train | model | LoRA or adapter | compatibility + task suite |
| distill | model | smaller student | teacher agreement + external holdout |
| quantize | model | lower precision artifact | accuracy and latency suite |
| prune | model | sparse artifact | rare-capability regression |
| merge adapters | model | fused specialist | interference tests |
| split expert | model architecture | narrower experts | routing and load balance |
| route policy edit | code/config | new selector | traffic replay and fairness |
| cache policy edit | code | faster runtime | correctness and latency |
| evaluator edit | governance/code | new test behavior | human review required |
Operator cards
Each operator should have an operator card with required inputs, forbidden inputs, resource limits, reproducibility steps, and scorecard requirements.
operator_card = {
name: "distill_specialist",
allowed_parent_states: ["champion", "approved-teacher"],
required_inputs: ["teacher_id", "training_case_manifest", "student_base_id"],
forbidden_inputs: ["hidden_holdout_labels", "production_secrets"],
output_state: "candidate",
max_gpu_hours: 12,
required_evaluations: ["task", "calibration", "safety", "latency", "teacher_error_inheritance"]
}Safe defaults
Start with distillation, adapter training, and quantization. Delay architecture search and evaluator edits until the registry, scorecards, and rollback process are reliable. Delay any autonomous code breeding until the code pipeline has strong tests and sandboxing.
The operator approval test
Ask three questions before adding an operator:
- Can we reproduce the output?
- Can we detect the most likely regressions?
- Can we rollback the result without affecting unrelated capabilities?
When the answer to any question is no, the operator belongs in research mode, not release mode.
Source reports used for this guide
These reports are preserved verbatim in the site archive. The guide above is an editorial synthesis and may narrow, qualify, or reorganize claims from the source material.