Self-Improving Project Factory

The self-improving evolution of Project Factory — the multi-agent SDD delivery framework — extended with a reflection & self-improvement layer: the factory now measures its own process with the same exit-coded rigor it applies to the product, turns human corrections into artifacts no gate can pass over, and propagates earned lessons into the next project’s gates. It is a public superset — every project-factory capability plus the reflection layer; nothing here is client-specific (all fixtures are synthetic, and campaign lessons cite their field reports abstractly). The layer is grounded in three field studies in this repo: the reflection mechanism design (the winning “Process-Health Ledger” design, 8 mechanisms, 12-step plan), the pixel-perfect forensics (the motivating failure: a run that printed “Pass” over an acceptance method it never executed), and the 13-project course field study.

What is new in the self-improving layer

The eight mechanisms (each shipped with an executed red→green proof under tests/; run npm test):

1. Process-health ledger (ledger.mjs) — every check run appends {check, exitCode, scope_n, phase, warningsByClass, …} to trace/ledger.jsonl; fail-open telemetry whose consumers are hard gates.
2. Acceptance-contract auditor (check-acceptance-methods.mjs) — joins every declared verification tag to a real mechanism (G3, existence) and a fresh threshold-passing artifact (G4+, artifact); the pixel-case killer, hard from day one.
3. Three-valued gate semantics — PASS / NOT-EARNED / FAIL + explicit SKIP-pending; absence of evidence never renders as success, and no overall “Pass” may sit on a NOT-EARNED constituent.
4. Correction intake (correct.mjs) — a user’s “this is not pixel perfect!” becomes retro/corrections/*.correction.json; undispositioned corrections are red OPEN-CORRECTION lines on every gate.
5. Process ratchet with tighten-only direction guard (check-process-ratchet.mjs + retrofitted coverage/eval ratchets) — per-class phase-aware warning budgets; any loosening --update is auto-rejected and requires a waiver artifact + owner-signed RULES-CHANGELOG.md row.
6. Reflection pass — deterministic digest (ledger-report.mjs → docs/qa/process-health.md) always; LLM process-auditor (plain subagent, maker≠checker) at phase boundaries, on demand, and at abandonment/handover → docs/qa/process-defects.json.
7. Bounded self-improvement queue — accepted defects become openspec/changes/improve-PD-x/ proposals with the exact diff, an EXECUTED red→green proof, and one-revert rollback; human-approved, and