Learning on the Job: Continual Learning from Deployment Feedback for Frozen-Weights Agents

AI agents encounter learning opportunities in every episode they run, and discard nearly all of them: the underlying models are frozen at deployment, so an agent that resolves a difficult request today starts from zero when it recurs tomorrow. Yet ordinary operation already produces feedback, in the form of outcome verdicts and after-the-fact corrections. We show that this feedback is a sufficient signal for continual learning when the frozen model is paired with an external memory that distils each episode into retrievable natural-language rules. On the banking domain of $τ$-bench, against a static-RAG control retrieving over the complete policy corpus, learning from the one-bit outcome verdict lifts single-trial success to 1.6$\times$ the baseline, and learning from corrections to 2.6$\times$, converting 22 of the 84 tasks the baseline never solves. The result spans the deployment spectrum, measured on Mistral Large, an open-weights model that organisations with data sovereignty requirements can self-host, and replicated on a frontier model, Claude Sonnet 5. The accumulated memory also transfers: each model, reading the store built by the other, rises above its own no-memory baseline. The harness, protocol, and data are released.

Smarter Together: Creating Agentic Communities of Practice through Shared Experiential Learning

The transition from human-centric to agent-centric software development practices is disrupting existing knowledge sharing environments for software developers. Traditional peer-to-peer repositories and developer communities for shared technical knowledge and best practice have witnessed dramatic drops in participation in a short period of time. At the same time, agentic functional equivalents are yet to emerge leaving AI agents, which already generate a significant proportion of all new software code produced, without access to repositories of valuable shared learning. In this paper, we introduce Spark, a novel shared agentic memory architecture which is designed to emulate the collective intelligence and know-how of human developer communities. Spark enables AI coding agents to both contribute to and draw from a persistent and continuously evolving experiential memory. Agents operating in the same general problem space use the Spark shared memory as a repository of new knowledge to achieve collective continual learning. We evaluate Spark as a coach for AI coding agents performing software development tasks. We demonstrate that recommendations made by Spark improve the quality of code generated by generic code generation models at varying sizes and capability tiers. Boosted by Spark, a small open-weights model with 30 billion parameters was able to match the code quality afforded by a much larger state-of-the-art model. Separately, we measure the intrinsic quality of recommendations generated by Spark against a wide range of criteria inspired by software development best practice, and achieve helpfulness levels of up to 98.2% in the top two (out of five) qualitative helpfulness bands.