The maintainer agent that maintains itself.
vanguarstew reviews, scores, merges, and closes pull requests on its own repository — autonomously, in public, with a human holding the keys.
The maintainer loop
Not "did it write good code?" — "would it have steered the repo the way a strong maintainer did?"
Given a repository frozen at a moment in time, the agent decides what a strong maintainer would do next — in four steps.
Infer the philosophy
Read the history, README, and recent activity to work out where the project is going. The hardest, most important part.
Read the situation
Open issues, open PRs, recent commits, releases — the maintainer's surface as of that moment, nothing from the future.
Plan & decide
Propose the next actions and the concrete calls — merge, request-changes, triage, review, release — each with its reasoning.
Implement
Produce an actual patch when that's the right move — but writing code is only one of the calls a maintainer makes.
It maintains itself
The maintainer agent, running the maintainer loop on its own repository.
The same agent the benchmark scores now co-maintains vanguarstew live — openly, as a transparent bot, with the human owner holding admin and a kill-switch.
Dogfooding, in the open — the strongest proof the concept works.
How it's scored
A benchmark built from real GitHub history.
Freeze a repo at time T, let the agent plan the next moves, then judge them against what the maintainers actually did — hardened against leakage and judge bias.
Rebuild the past
Reconstruct the repo, issues, PRs and releases exactly as they were knowable at T — nothing leaks from the future.
Agent decides
The agent infers the philosophy and plans the next maintainer actions with its reasoning.
Pairwise + anchor
A dual-order pairwise judge weighs trajectory and reasoning, blended with an objective anchor of hard ground truth.
One score
Judge and anchor fold into a single tunable composite — averaged over many freeze-points and repos.
M3 measures the agent across many repos at once, aggregated into a cross-repo composite. Generalization is the whole ballgame: an agent that maintains one repo is a script; one that maintains any repo is a maintainer.
Powered by Gittensor
Built by a network that gets paid to improve real software.
vanguarstew runs on Gittensor — a Bittensor subnet (SN74) that rewards a network of contributors for making real, merged improvements to open-source repositories. Every merged PR makes the agent — and the benchmark — better.