Developmental stage
One of five capability phases the system advances through based on demonstrated readiness: seed, novice, apprentice, integrative, and open-ended. Higher-capability operations are gated on evidence of proficiency at the preceding stage, not elapsed time.
The five developmental stages - seed, novice, apprentice, integrative, and open-ended - gate access to progressively more powerful and risky capabilities based on demonstrated performance rather than arbitrary timers. A seed-stage system has basic perception and retrieval; a novice system has added reinforcement and basic policy adaptation; an apprentice system has multi-agent deliberation and reflection; an integrative system has full meta-cognitive control including curiosity, dreaming, and world-model calibration; an open-ended system is authorized to propose structural capability changes. Advancement requires a mean capability score above a configured threshold across a sustained evaluation window - the system must demonstrate it has reliably mastered the current stage's capabilities before the next stage's gates open. This sequencing matters because later capabilities depend on earlier ones being well-calibrated: open-ended capability search is only meaningful if the world model that evaluates proposed mutations is already reliable, which requires the grounding engine and calibration infrastructure from the integrative stage to already be working well.