When a self-improving AI-for-science system claims a new capability, the evidence is usually a benchmark delta, a description-length gate, or a p-value. None separates a real gain from extra search, from a changed verifier, or from adaptation to a fallible oracle. We build a two-sided audit whose negative side is a formal fact: a pseudoknot-free oracle provably cannot represent a crossing base pair, so the prior verifier's range is bounded exactly, offline, before any run. "New" is relative to the agent's prior self, never to the base model. First, how far a single fallible oracle can inflate a capability claim. An invented, solver-free operator solves 43/60 crossing RNA targets under the predictor it optimizes, above a context-free floor of 0/60; under three predictors, 1/60 survives. Paired on the same 43 targets, a predictor the operator never saw confirms 2 of its designs against 26 for a minimum-free-energy solver (p = 8e-7). No statistic computed from the system and its own oracle sees that gap. Second, agent-written procedures can beat a human-written one under a judge no objective can flatter, at a fraction of the compute. Of six frontier models, the two whose operators ran without timeouts carry over at 0.293 against our 0.095 (n = 951 paired units, target-clustered [+0.108, +0.297], p = 5e-5) while spending 4.6-10x fewer oracle calls. Three rungs: difference under an outside adjudicator (reached), not bought with compute (reached, both directions), mechanism identified and transferable (not reached; seven candidates tested, none moves the statistic). The ceiling is the panel itself: its three predictors share nearest-neighbour thermodynamic parameters, two agreeing at kappa = 0.673. The audit is as unsparing about our own system: matched undirected search is an exact zero, and a search-free probe puts 84% of our headline effect on targets a random sequence already solves.
While current AI agents support increasingly long context windows, tool use, and skill execution for long-horizon tasks, they still require memory systems to effectively leverage historical experience. Existing memory frameworks typically rely on fixed storage, retrieval, and summarization mechanisms, which can be rigid across different tasks and often require manual tuning. To address this limitation, we propose SelfMem, a self-optimizing memory framework. Inspired by prior work on self-improving AI, we follow the principle of "teaching an agent to fish rather than giving it a fish." Instead of forcing the model to follow a predefined memory strategy or format, SelfMem provides an environment with memory tools and feedback signals that allow the agent to explore, evaluate, and refine its own memory strategy. Our results show that SelfMem consistently outperforms retrieval, compression, and agent-memory baselines on BEAM across conversation scales from 100K to 1M tokens. Compared with the strongest baseline, SelfMem improves the official score by 48.7%, 40.8%, and 41.9% at 100K, 500K, and 1M, respectively. Further question-type analysis shows broad robustness across diverse memory demands, and our optimization study shows that model-guided strategy refinement further improves performance.