Agent skill · research science · nousresearch
darwinian-evolver
Evolve prompts/regex/SQL/code with Imbue's evolution loop.
Why this skill is useful
Adds a custom Python driver and scripts for running evolutionary optimization on prompts, regex, SQL queries, or code snippets, which are not commonly available in public resources.
What it needs
Requires git, python, uv installed locally. Requires anthropic, openai, openrouter account access. About 4k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 226,679 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Darwinian Evolver Run Imbue's darwinianevolver — an LLM-driven evolutionary search loop — to optimize a prompt, regex, SQL query, or small code snippet against a fitness function. Status: thin wrapper around the upstream tool. The skill installs it, walks the agent through writing a Problem definition (organism + evaluator + mutator), and drives the loop via the upstream CLI or a small custom Python driver. License: the upstream tool is AGPL-3.0. The skill ONLY ever invokes it via the upstream CLI or a subprocess/uv run call (mere aggregation). Do NOT import upstream classes into Hermes itself. When to Use User says "optimize this prompt", "evolve a regex for X", "auto-improve this code/SQL", "search for a better instruction". You have a scorer (exact match, regex pass-rate, unit test, LLM-judge, runtime metric) AND a starting candidate (organism). If you don't have a scorer, stop and define one first — that's the hard part. Cost is OK: a typical run is 50–500 LLM calls. On gpt-4o-mini that's pennies; on Claude Sonnet it can be a few dollars. Do not use this when: The optimization target is differentiable (use gradient descent / DSPy). You only need to try 2–3 variants — just write them by hand. The fitness signal is purely subjective with no measurable criterion. Prerequisites Python ≥3.11 git, uv (or pip) One of: OPENROUTERAPIKEY, ANTHROPICAPIKEY, or OPENAIAPIKEY The skill ships a small parrotopenrouter.py driver that uses OPENROUTERAPIKEY via the OpenAI SDK, so any model on OpenRouter works. The upstream CLI itself hardcodes Anthropic and needs ANTHROPICAPIKEY. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills nousresearch/darwinian-evolver