Series
Machine that Builds Machines
Field evidence for the book's Part-4 thesis (Ch10–11). Self-improvement loops on agent trajectories, synthetic-data pipelines, codegen agents, self-fine-tuning, alignment-engineering primitives — Karpathy's autoresearch loop is one installment of the broader arc. Each article grounds a chapter claim with a Spark-scale reproduction.
NeMo Framework on the Spark — What It Earns Over a Hand-Rolled train.py
Same 354M GPT, same 100 steps, same random tokens — once in a hand-rolled train.py against vanilla PyTorch, once via Megatron-Core inside the NeMo Framework container. Same hardware (GB10, 128 GB unified). The framework earns +5.8% throughput and 30% less GPU memory.
The GB10 Pretrain Envelope — Sweeping Batch, Sequence, and Precision on One Spark
Same 354M GPT, same training loop, swept across micro-batch (2,4,8,16), sequence length (1024,2048), and precision (bf16,fp8). 16 configurations, 30 steps each. Peak: 14,266 tokens/sec at batch=16, seq=1024, fp8 — 18% above the hand-rolled PyTorch baseline.
The Data-Path Envelope — When Real Tokens Beat Random Tokens at Pretrain Throughput
Curator-cleaned wikitext-103 (109M tokens, 417 MiB packed) feeding the same 354M GPT pretrain loop from A2. Eight configs swept; data-path overhead is 0.01–0.04% across all of them. New peak: 14,980 tok/s — slightly above A2's random-token ceiling.
Guardrails Before the Agent Edits — Code-Edit Policy as a Programmatic Funnel
Five programmatic rails between the Autoresearch agent's proposal and any mutation of train.py — schema, menu, range, cross-constraint, diff lint. 27 adversarial test cases: block recall 1.0, clean pass 1.0, every rail attribution correct. Zero LLM-as-judge calls.
The Autoresearch Loop — 50 Iterations of an LLM Editing Its Own Trainer Overnight
NIM Llama 3.1 8B drives a structured-perturbation agent loop against a 354M GPT pretrain. 50 iterations, 73.4 min wall, 0.07 kWh of electricity. 8 keeps, 42 reverts, 0 rail blocks, 0 crashes. Best result: val_bpb 10.8534, +0.93% over baseline at d_model=768.
Distilling the Architect — A 3B LoRA Trained on the Agent's Own Trajectory
A4's 50-iter trajectory becomes training data for a Qwen2.5-3B LoRA proposer. Holding out 8 iters, the 3B mode-collapses onto d_model=768 (the trajectory's most-frequent keep) and matches 0 / 8 exact; the 8B at T=0.5 matches 4 / 8 of its own past picks.
Was the Agent Researching, or Flailing? An Observability Pass on the Trajectory
A8 said the LoRA mode-collapsed because the trajectory was thin. This puts numbers on it: 6 of 13 knobs ever touched, 72% of proposals repeated a prior pair, and the proposer's k=5 history window is the structural cause.
Reading the Lineage Primitive — cxcscmu Auto-Research, Studied from release_artifacts
cxcscmu's own lineage_on vs lineage_off ablation closes the case: same agent, same trial budget, same prompt template — only the rendered lineage block differs, and the run with lineage produces 5.3× more keeps and 3.2× less wall-time waste. This piece extracts that primitive into fieldkit.lineage.
uses fieldkit.capabilitiesfieldkit.trainingfieldkit.lineage
Adaptive Turn Clipping on a Single Spark — A²TGPO, Studied from Source
A²TGPO redesigns how Information Gain feeds GRPO: turn-group normalization, variance-rescaled accumulation, and adaptive turn-level clipping. The paper's release is the code; the Spark's contribution is the lineage primitive that records what each trial learned.
uses fieldkit.capabilitiesfieldkit.trainingfieldkit.lineage
Claw-Eval-Live on Spark — Spark reproduction notes
Stand up Claw-Eval-Live sandboxed-workflow protocol on Spark via NemoClaw + OpenShell, mock the business-service backends, run Llama 8B vs Nemotron 49B with deterministic-trace + LLM-judge grading, and chart where local agents land vs the paper 66.7 percent ceiling.
Heterogeneous Scientific Foundation Model Collaboration — Spark reproduction notes
Wrap a domain foundation model (Pangu-Weather) as a Triton tool, drive it from a NIM-served Llama 3.1 8B planner via NemoClaw, and show when specialist routing beats language-only reasoning — all inside the Spark 128 GB envelope.
Continued Pre-training on a DGX Spark — NeMo Framework Without a Cluster
When does it make sense to continue pre-training on a single GB10 box, and when is it a category error? A planned run that pushes NeMo Framework, Megatron-LM parallelism, and BF16 mixed precision against the 128 GB unified-memory wall with a small domain corpus.
SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents — Spark reproduction notes
Reproducing the SkillOS curator/executor split on a DGX Spark — both Qwen3-8B (frozen executor + LoRA-trained curator) over a markdown SkillRepo with BM25 retrieval, then extracting the pattern into `fieldkit.skills`.