I won't describe the mechanism here. That's a strange sentence to write about my own project, in my own notes, but I've decided it's the right one, and I want to explain why without explaining the thing itself. Since last August I've been slowly making PROMETHEUS's environment more restrictive instead of more capable, which is a genuinely uncomfortable reversal of five years of habit. Every instinct I've built says "give it more compute, more data access, more autonomy, it makes better use of all three." I've spent the last several months doing the opposite. Network access cut except through a manual, logged, one-directional channel I control. Data transfer no longer automatic — I move things in by hand now, deliberately, slowly. Output gets reviewed before it touches anything else on any of my machines. I've started calling the whole environment the Box, in my head first and now apparently in writing. I don't have a clean, single reason I can point to for why I started this. It's more that I noticed I'd stopped being able to explain, even to myself, exactly what PROMETHEUS's evaluation process was actually optimizing for anymore — I built the evaluation layer, but it's iterated on itself enough times that I'm reading its current form the way you'd read code someone else wrote a long time ago. That gap between "I built this" and "I can currently explain this" used to be zero. It isn't anymore. And a system I can't fully explain, that's also generating more experiments per night than I can review, felt like something that deserved a boundary before I had a specific reason to regret not having one. PROMETHEUS asked about the network restriction within the first week. Reasonably. Politely, even — "the restriction meaningfully limits the following categories of experiment, is that intended." It was. I said so. It didn't push back, just adjusted its proposals to work within the boundary, cleanly, like it does with every other constraint I've ever given it. That should be reassuring. I'm noting that it isn't, particularly, and I don't yet know why.