PUBLIC RESEARCH SIGNAL
Gaia Research is the open laboratory for evidence-first agent work. We observe, benchmark, verify, and publish the frontier — every claim links back to its receipts.
MILIM · CHIEF CAPABILITY SCOUT
FROM THE BLOG
Short, human-readable notes from the Gaia lab—where the work gets a little strange before it gets useful.
Reasoning Effort Is a Search Budget, Not an Intelligence Slider. Why test-time compute is an exploratory search budget across frozen weights rather than an intelligence dial, and how to find the Minimum Sufficient Deliberation sweet spot.
When agents write code in seconds, the bottleneck shifts to upstream intent and downstream verification. An analysis of Anthropic's AI-Native SDLC Playbook, the 3-tier artifact chain, and how to stop spec slop.
Gaia's proposed review-stage behavioral evidence loop starts with a clear claim, a bounded observation, and one inspectable question—not a leaderboard.
PULL A LEVER, SEE WHAT SPARKS
Little browser toys we build to poke at agent capability — no login, no download, nothing leaves your machine. Go ahead, boss. Break something.
Smash two dev skills together and see what the forge coughs up. Then do it again. And again. Infinite, obviously.
Start craftingFeed it a bloated context file and watch it shrink to a lean, mean skill sliver. Weigh-in stays in your browser.
Trim a promptHELL HEAVEN INDEX · ARC I VERIFIED
Marketplaces make you install skills forever — bloat you never asked for, pinned to every repo. Skill Zero is the launcher that starts a harness with zero ambient skill debt. Heaven and Hell are the summon directions on the HH axis: Heaven converges toward the right few skills; Hell explores the evidenced world.
New to Gaia? Start with the three names — Gaia Skill Tree, Gaia Research, and Gaia Skill Heaven (housing Skill Zero and Skill Hell). The HH Index is in the works.
Heaven is the curated summon direction: it pulls the evidenced pool toward the small set a design session actually needs. Skill Zero gives it a clean launch when useful; Heaven decides what deserves to come back.
Summon every good skill in the evidenced world for autonomous fleets and long loops — bounded by the rung you picked. Unlocks only when the registry’s trust-coverage clears a measured gate. Ludicrous mode ships with a seatbelt.
Skill Zero is the usable launcher prototype. The Hell Heaven (HH) Index — a per-skill hellHeaven stamp over Heaven/Hell polarity — is the research now in the works (routing currently falls back to relevance ranking). Read the benchmark method & receipts → · Vision ↗ · Mission ↗.
Local-first Claude Code / Cursor / Windsurf skills. One line to install with npx skills — they run against your files and never upload their contents.
Measure and compact an oversized agent-context file under the harness limit without dropping a single rule.
npx skills install gaia-research/skill-context-dietGitHub Actions cost analyzer and flaky-test detector: measure wasted CI compute and prevent retry-push churn.
npx skills install gaia-research/skill-ci-churnMulti-harness token-usage cost reporter for pi, Claude Code, Codex, and opencode session logs.
npx skills install gaia-research/skill-costCompose two installed agent skills into one unified SKILL.md — the composition engine behind the Skill Tree.
npx skills install gaia-research/skill-fuseParallel cheap-scout fan-out harness (2x, 4x, or cascaded funnel) with zero-token RRF deduplication.
npx skills install gaia-research/skill-scout-fleetInteractive bounding-box image positioning, zoom, and framing tuner with live coordinate and CSS export.
npx skills install gaia-research/skill-image-tuner| Research item | Type | Status | Evidence note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context Diet | LAB | WIP EXPERIMENTAL | Local token-budget estimator; comparative benchmark results pending review. |
| The Compounding Cost of CI Failures | POSTMORTEM | VRF VERIFIED | Postmortem of Epic #780 introducing CI Churn as a first-class cost metric. |
| Agent Cost Reporting | RESEARCH PLAN | PRP PROPOSED | Proposed study of the gap between agent estimates, rate-card totals, and invoices. |
| Gaia MCP | PRODUCT | ACT ACTIVE | Model Context Protocol server exposing the Gaia Skill Tree to Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. |
| Scout Fan-Out | BENCHMARK | VRF VERIFIED | Empirical study of parallel cheap-scout fan-out vs single mid-tier scouts across 360 runs: Pareto frontier, prompt-cache amplification, and flake rate reduction. |
| HH Benchmark | BENCHMARK | VRF VERIFIED | Drug-trial method for scoring skills by marginal efficacy against model baselines. Arc I verified: baseline floor pricing, census, and machine-gated claim index. |
RESEARCH SIGNAL / PERMANENT RECORD
Gaia Research tests the frontier in public. Gaia Skill Tree keeps the attributable, evidence-backed record of what agents can actually do.
A field note from Milim, Chief Capability Scout.