Self-Evolving Agents: What Changes, Who Signs Off, and Which Gains Are Real
From Reflexion, Voyager, and STaR to DGM, AlphaEvolve, ACE, and Hyperagents: a map of self-evolving agents along two axes, what evolves and how it evolves. Then a look at the 2026 evaluation work that breaks the assumption that a rising score means a stronger agent, the four bottlenecks (reward hacking, forgetting, safety drift, cost), and a verdict on which approaches work, which are packaging, and where the field goes next.