Lineage-Directed Skill Evolution: Path as Feature — A Design Theory for Experience-Shaped, Self-Improving AI Skills in Verifiable Domains

Contemporary AI capability is produced centrally, by training, and delivered frozen at deployment. Downstream, autonomous agents apply that fixed capability through skills — concrete, task-level procedures — whose improvement, even where automated, is governed by static rules: rules that improve skills but do not improve themselves. Two ceilings follow: a volume ceiling (more skills and rules to maintain than any team sustains) and an imagination ceiling (improvement only along axes a human pre-conceived). We call the resulting condition the autonomy paradox — autonomous agents running on a hand-maintained skill base that trends toward maintenance collapse. We present Lineage-Directed Skill Evolution (LDSE), a design theory (Gregor Type V) for a skill layer that improves itself through variation, selection, and inheritance directed by a hard test oracle, in domains where "better" is deterministically decidable. LDSE couples a market (self-organizing selection, curation, retirement) with a reactor (self-improvement through mutation and emergence-gated recombination), and preserves the full provenance of every skill change as a first-class, inspectable artifact. Building on our prior governed-marketplace design theory (AGORA), LDSE treats the hard oracle not as truth but as a fallible referee, and discharges the resulting governance problem — how a self-improving population judges its own improvements without a human in the per-decision loop — with a triad: a fallible selection oracle drives evolution, an independent held-out oracle (never optimized against) detects gaming as an automatic gate, and complete provenance attributes each flagged change to its cause. On this substrate a distinctive product emerges: experience-shaped competence profiles — informally "digital seniors" — and their composition into a Competence Mosaic, which (conditional on the central proposition below) doubles as the decorrelated checker set that keeps the loop honest. The theory's central proposition, Path-Dependent Competence (equal skill + equal knowledge but a different formation path → different generalization), is stated as a testable proposition with a complete, pre-registrable twin-design test protocol; it is the paper's methodological core, not a claimed result. We distinguish our contribution sharply from the growing body of population-based skill/harness evolution (which optimizes against a fitness signal and treats single-lineage search as a pathology to avoid): LDSE is the design theory in which path-dependence is an intended, inspectable, and causally-testable property against a fixed oracle rather than an avoided bug. A pilot instantiation on a 1B-parameter open model supports the selection claim (H1) and demonstrates the mechanism; the causal test of H3 is specified as future work requiring cluster-scale compute.