● Build sandboxed environments that wrap real Niural workflows, stateful across episodes so that an action in one task changes the state a later task sees
● Seeded and replayable, so a result from six weeks ago can be reproduced today
● Difficulty knobs and curriculum structure, so environments can stay at the edge of what our agents can currently do
● Realistic mess as a feature, not an accident: missing fields, stale records, contradictory sources. Payroll data supplies all of it for free
● Generate the synthetic data these environments run on, because real customer payroll data cannot leave our systems
Engineer the rewards and verifiers
● Design programmatic verifiers from known ground truth, and reach for a model as judge only where nothing else is possible
● Score trajectories rather than final answers. Two runs can take different paths and both be right, or be wrong for different reasons
● Build against reward hacking and against contamination, and assume the agent will find whatever hole you leave
Train agents, and prove it worked
● Run the training: reinforcement learning loops, curriculum schedules, fine tuning and distillation where they earn their place
● Establish honest baselines, run ablations, and measure whether an improvement generalizes or only fits your environment
● Publish negative results internally. A well measured failure is worth more to us than a demo
● One to two week spikes on agent architectures, memory strategies, tool use patterns and scaffolds, tested against the Gym rather than against your intuition
● Hand what works to the teams building our production agents, and stay involved until it lands
● First author research papers for Niural AI, taken from real work, with reproducible methodology and an honest limitations section
● Internal technical reports that the product and engineering teams actually read
● Represent the work externally over time: preprints, talks, and possibly open sourced environments