Skip to content

Innovation engine

The hardest problem in the system is pushing genuinely new design without drifting off-brand. The innovation engine solves it with structure: invention is directed (it grows from what already graded well), bounded (silhouettes and the scene never change), and fenced (recently used language is off limits, so novelty can't quietly become repetition).

The knob

innovate_pct (Control → Innovation; default 100%). Each roster look rolls deterministically (by prompt ID) against it. Innovation slots get the INNOVATE block; the others compose conservatively from the garment's own seed variants.

What an innovation slot does

  1. Silhouette stays VERBATIM — innovation never invents garment bodies (that's the Lab's job). It invents construction language.
  2. Two innovation axes rotate per look out of eight: collar architecture, closure systems, panel mapping, hem geometry, layering logic, texture pairing, hardware language, surface treatment. A batch sweeps the whole design space instead of re-exploring fabric+detail every time. Axis examples are declared already used — the model must invent new instances, not copy the illustrations.
  3. Proven directions — Shawn's standing catalyst guidance (material mixing 2–4 per garment, texture-on-texture, zip-front + concealed plackets, safari longer-back, edgy hybrids) injected as push-further targets. Growth is directed from what graded well, not random.
  4. Familiar + frontier — each model anchors one proven element and pushes one frontier element.
  5. Anti-repetition fence — construction phrases mined from the last 40 looks (8 syntactic patterns, frequency-ordered, cap 32) are handed to the model as a do-NOT-reuse list. Novelty is enforced against the growing corpus, so the engine cannot converge on yesterday's "fresh" phrases.
  6. Scene is UNTOUCHABLE — innovation lives only inside garment descriptions.

Where to watch it

  • Strategist → Learning: the axes, proven directions, live fence, novelty %
  • Strategist → Runs: per-batch report card (novelty vs prior, scene, brand language)
  • GET /api/admin/discovery and GET /api/admin/batch-report/{batch_id}