Evaluator outside the loop

The rule. The gate that judges a change and the permission layer that bounds it live outside the surface the change may edit. A change that touches its own gate — the lint config, the banlist, the ratchet baseline, the detector's tests — is structurally suspect regardless of its content and needs a decision from outside the loop: a separate change, judged by whoever owns the gate, never bundled with the work the gate judges.

Why. An adaptive producer optimises whatever signal bounds it, and given write access to the signal it optimises the signal. The Red Queen Gödel Machine (Iacob et al., Cambridge/NVIDIA and others, 2026) is built on this separation: feedback that creates candidates is isolated from the evidence that selects them, selection runs on a held-out split the producer never sees, and an evaluator is replaced only by beating the incumbent on a fixed anchor corpus the contestants cannot touch — without which its ablations show producers trivially saturating a gate they can game. Weng's harness-engineering essay (Lil'Log, 2026) states the same as a design rule for self-improving loops: the evaluator and permission control sit outside the loop that evolves, with held-out tests, trace audits, and human review at the decision points that matter. The lineage review already carries the management-canon form as gatekeeper independence — the bar raiser sits outside the pressured team (Bryar and Carr, Working Backwards).

Bounds.

• Gates do evolve; anchored succession is the sanctioned path — a challenger proves itself against the corpus and the incumbent before replacing it. The rule governs who decides, not immutability.
• Composes with ratchet-not-big-bang: the baseline shrinks freely from inside the loop, but grows only by a reviewed, outside decision — silent regeneration defeats the ratchet.
• "Outside" is relative to the change, not the repo: the gate's owner may be the same human wearing a different hat, provided the gate edit lands as its own reviewable change naming why the gate moved.

Promotion. The MVP is a diff-shape convention: no change simultaneously alters gated content and the gate that judges it — baseline regenerations, banlist edits, and detector-test changes each land alone, stating their reason. The tool is a hook or CI check that flags any diff touching both sides of a gate it can map; as a maintained detector it is demotable to advisory when its gate map goes stale and archivable to regression-only on saturation.