New Year's Day: an RCA abstraction ladder for FMEA-mediated self-remediation.

New year, and an explicit theory of how Gaius learns from its own mistakes. The Root Cause Analysis framework lands as a five-order abstraction ladder, applied after every self-remediation event:

• Order 0 — Symptom. The observable failure.
• Order 1 — Immediate. The triggering action.
• Order 2 — Structural. The configuration that allowed it.
• Order 3 — Invariant. The CP-SAT constraint that was violated.
• Order 4 — Design. The system-modeling improvement implied.

Every incident receives an RCA classification — OPERATIONAL (a transient; close the incident) or ARCHITECTURAL (open a GitHub issue against the framework itself). Order-3-and-above observations connect the symptom back to the scheduler’s CP-SAT constraint vocabulary, so a single repair becomes a systematic framework improvement over time. The FMEA catalog records the trail; the RCA classifier reads it; the autonomous remediation loop acts on it.

The phrase self-improving gets used loosely. The version we mean is not a model that updates its own weights — it is an engineered system that observes its own failure modes, reasons about them under a fixed vocabulary, and escalates the ones that matter into review. The ladder is how the reasoning becomes legible.