🔄 Loop Engineering Skill

Design autonomous agent feedback cycles instead of hand-prompting each step.

Inspired by Rahul's "Loops: What Every AI Engineer Needs to Know in 2026" — and the core insight from Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw) and Boris Cherny (Claude Code): stop prompting your agents. Start designing loops.

Features

Feature	Description
5-Stage Framework	DISCOVER → PLAN → EXECUTE → VERIFY → ITERATE
6 Components	Automations, Worktrees, Skills, Plugins, Subagents, Memory
Single-Agent Loop	One agent runs the full cycle on focused tasks
Fleet Loop	Orchestrator + specialists + subagents for complex goals
Closed Loop	Self-verifying cycle with stop conditions — pays off today
Project Context	VISION.md / ARCHITECTURE.md / RULES.md per project
Skill Compounding	Knowledge accumulates across loop runs

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    LOOP ENGINEERING                  │
│                                                     │
│  GOAL → CONTEXT → ACTION → FEEDBACK → STOP          │
│         ↓                                            │
│    ┌──────────┐                                      │
│    │ DISCOVER │                                      │
│    └────┬─────┘                                      │
│         ↓                                            │
│    ┌──────────┐                                      │
│    │  PLAN    │                                      │
│    └────┬─────┘                                      │
│         ↓                                            │
│    ┌──────────┐                                      │
│    │ EXECUTE  │                                      │
│    └────┬─────┘                                      │
│         ↓                                            │
│    ┌──────────┐     FAIL                              │
│    │ VERIFY   ├──────→ ITERATE ──────┐               │
│    └────┬─────┘                      │               │
│         ↓ PASS                       │               │
│    ┌──────────┐                      │               │
│    │   DONE   │                      │               │
│    └──────────┘                      │               │
│         └────────────────────────────┘               │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Hermes Agent (or any LLM agent framework)
• Git (for worktrees)
• A test suite in your project (pytest, npm test, go test)

1. Load the skill

load loop-engineering

2. Set up a project for loops

# Create project context docs
touch VISION.md ARCHITECTURE.md RULES.md

# Set up parallel worktrees
bash scripts/setup-worktrees.sh /path/to/project experiments hotfix

# Run a dev loop
bash scripts/dev-loop.sh /path/to/project 5

3. Schedule nightly loops

cronjob action=create \
  name=my-project-dev-loop \
  workdir=/path/to/project \
  schedule="0 3 * * *" \
  prompt="Follow the 5-stage loop..."

4. Compound knowledge

bash scripts/skill-compounder.sh my-project /path/to/project \
  "Lesson Title" "What we learned this run"

Project Structure

loop-engineering-skill/
├── SKILL.md                  # Hermes skill definition
├── README.md                 # English documentation
├── README.zh-TW.md           # Traditional Chinese
├── LICENSE                   # MIT license
└── scripts/
    ├── dev-loop.sh           # Write → test → fix → verify
    ├── setup-worktrees.sh    # Git worktrees for parallel agents
    └── skill-compounder.sh   # Post-loop knowledge accumulation

The Core Shift

Old way (prompting):   You → Prompt → Agent → Output → You review → Fix → Repeat
New way (looping):     You set goal → Loop runs → Agent discovers → Plans → Executes → Verifies → Iterates → Done

Prompt engineers ask AI for output. Loop engineers design systems that produce verified outcomes.

Cost Management

• Single-agent medium task: 50K-200K tokens
• Fleet loop + 3 specialists: 500K-2M tokens
• Scheduled daily loop: millions of tokens per week

Use cheap frontier models (DeepSeek V4 Flash, Kimi, MiniMax) for loops. Reserve expensive models for critical verification passes.

Related Skills

• project-context/camera-market — C2C photography marketplace with full loop setup
• project-context/polymarket-bot — Live trading bot with nightly dev loop cron
• engineering/codex — Codex CLI delegation for coding tasks

License

MIT — see LICENSE.