What is evolver?

Evolver is a command-line tool that helps AI coding agents improve themselves over time by analyzing what they have done and generating structured guidance for future runs. The core idea is that instead of manually tweaking prompts each time an agent makes a mistake, you let Evolver scan the agent's activity logs, identify patterns, and produce a condensed piece of reusable guidance called a Gene. That Gene gets passed back into the agent on the next run, gradually making the agent more effective at the specific work in your project. The approach is based on a research concept called GEP, which the README describes as a way to encode agent experience as compact structures rather than as long skill documents or ad hoc prompt additions. A research paper linked in the README tested this across thousands of controlled trials and found that the Gene representation outperformed skill-document approaches at carrying improvements forward over multiple iterations. Using it starts with one install command via npm. Running evolver inside any git-initialized project folder scans a memory directory for logs, selects an appropriate Gene from its built-in pool, prints a GEP prompt to the terminal, and writes an audit record called an EvolutionEvent. It works fully offline. An optional network connection to the EvoMap platform unlocks skill sharing and leaderboards across different agents. Setup hooks integrate Evolver with agent runtimes like Cursor or Claude Code so it fires automatically at the start of each session or after file edits. All evolution history is stored in a local folder called memory inside your project, and the tool uses git to calculate the scope of changes and to support rollbacks. Running without a git repository will fail with an error message. One licensing note from the README: Evolver started under MIT and later switched to GPL-3.0. Future versions will move to source-available terms, meaning they will be viewable but not freely usable for all purposes. Already-published versions keep their original licenses. The full README is longer than what was shown.