v0.19.6 — cheaper skill-card injection
This is the release note as published, not a rewrite of it. Release notes are published in the language they were written in.
The self-evolution flywheel's card-reading loop (injecting learned reasoning cards into the agent's context) was kept opt-in mostly because injection cost +~349% tokens on short tasks. This release cuts that ~7–9×.
Changed
- Skill-card injection is ~7–9× cheaper. Three levers, measured over two runs on the hard suite:
- inject the single best card (
CHIMERA_SKILL_CARDS_K=1, was 3), - a relevance gate (
CHIMERA_SKILL_CARDS_MIN_OVERLAP=2) — a task with no strong match (< 2 shared query terms) injects nothing, so it pays no tokens and gets no misleading card, - a shorter render (
CHIMERA_SKILL_CARDS_MAX_LINES=3). Overhead dropped from +~349% to ~+37–48%, now under the registered +50% flip gate. These are the new defaults (they only apply when card reading is opted in).
- inject the single best card (
Honest note
The M19-A1 default (reading cards automatically) still stays OFF — the cost blocker is removed, but the accuracy lift isn't statistically significant at n=12 (it swung +16.7pp → −8.3pp between identical free-model runs). Flipping it now waits on a larger paired A/B, not on code. See bench/skillcard/RESULTS.md.
Gate: 1460 passed / 3 skipped, mypy + ruff green.
Upgrade: `pip install --upgrade 'chimera-agent[full]'`