First Loop in Loop Engineering

Lessons in this section

1. From Prompting to Loops

   Stop being the person who types every prompt. See the reason, act, observe cycle of one agent, then put a loop around it with four parts: a trigger, an agent, a verifier and a stop rule.

2. State

   The loop's memory outside the conversation. Watch a loop with no state file do the same ticket twice, then give it a state.md file that it reads first and writes last.

3. Maker vs Checker

   The writer never grades itself. Watch a self-graded loop approve four broken fixes, then add a checker subagent with its own rubric that runs the tests.

4. Stop Rules

   Goal conditions, iteration caps and no-progress detection. Watch a runaway loop burn its budget on a flaky test, then write the three rules that make every loop end.

5. Triggers

   Goal loops vs cadence loops, hooks and CI. Watch a goal loop miss the failures that arrive tomorrow, then turn it into a daily triage loop that stays quiet on empty days.

6. Skills Inside the Loop

   Plus your v1 export. Move 300 pasted lines of instructions into a triage skill, watch the tokens per turn drop by more than half, then export your first loop pack for Claude Code, Codex or Cursor.