14 Composing Creative Workflows

AGENTIC: Acquiring Generalizable Novel Theories
with Infinitesimal Creativity

CLIC, OPTIC, and RELIC each maintain a different theory and may propose revisions to it. CLIC maintains a theory of how a world responds to intervention. OPTIC maintains a theory of executable skills and their composition. RELIC maintains a theory of which decisions are available and useful over time. A scientific agent needs all three, but merely placing their implementations in one software process does not yet produce an integrated creativity system. Their claims, types, admission records, and revision histories must compose.

This chapter specifies that composition. Its primary object is a meta-sketch: a versioned declaration linking a causal theory, a skill theory, and a decision theory. The connections themselves may fail. A causal mechanism may be well supported but not actionable; a skill may execute but not improve decisions; a policy failure may be localized only after the agent performs a new intervention. Such cross-workflow failures provide a new class of obstruction and, potentially, a new source of creativity.

We call the integrated architecture AGENTIC: Acquiring Generalizable Novel Theories with Infinitesimal Creativity. “Acquiring” emphasizes active experiment and evidence rather than passive generation; “generalizable” requires transport beyond the discovery setting; “novel theories” identifies structural construction as the target; and “infinitesimal creativity” names the DIAL discipline used to diagnose and coordinate local repair. The expanded name states the architectural target, not the empirical conclusion of this chapter. CLIC, OPTIC, and RELIC are its causal, skill, and decision workflows.

These names denote architectural mandates, not a retrospective claim that every component experiment has already achieved creativity. The evidence in Chapters 11–13 ranges from mechanism calibration and guarded adaptation to bounded combinational construction. AGENTIC must retain those component-level statuses rather than promote them merely because the workflows have been connected.

¹1. Chapter roadmap. The chapter defines the three maintained theories and their exchange packets, then studies workflow algebra, cross-workflow obstructions, integrated episodes, ablations, active evidence, and the stronger requirement for genuine meta-accommodation. ↩