Everyone designs loops. No one asks what the agent knows each tick.
Loop engineering's six building blocks are context primitives wearing new names. The scheduling is cron; what decides the outcome is the context on each tick.
Engineering Blog
Technical insights into multi-agent orchestration, local protocols, and
developer-centric terminal workflows.
Your agent re-litigates decisions because you delete the answer.
Session transcripts are an external memory most people delete after 30 days. A skill that greps and re-ranks them turns 'what did we decide' into an answer.
One agent drowns in a 1000-line spec. A hundred finish it by morning.
Decompose a reviewed spec into discrete tasks and spawn a fresh headless agent per task. Each unit gets a clean context window and a pass/fail gate.
A green build is the weakest 'done' - and your agent's first choice.
Write the exact verification step into the feature spec your agent loads, so 'done' means the test passed - not that the code compiled.
The fastest way to corrupt money is an agent-built payment system.
Not all code is equally expensive to get wrong. Stop reviewing your agent's output uniformly and spend your scrutiny where a mistake double-charges a customer.
Headless mode isn't a flag you set. It's a privilege you earn.
Taking the human out of the loop is the real unlock - but headless plus loose permissions plus production access is how you wake up to a wiped repo.
When you know where the context lives, stop letting the agent guess.
Agent-driven file discovery burns turns and fills the window with wrong guesses. A parameterized priming command loads exactly the right files in one shot.
Put the confirmation gate in the tool, not the UI.
A destructive-tool annotation plus a mid-call elicitation request gives you a human checkpoint that travels with the capability, whichever client is driving.
Your 600-line rules file is teaching the agent to ignore you.
A single giant root rules file dilutes the agent's attention. Split context into a broad root plus directory-scoped files it loads by what it's touching.
Stop writing rules for failures your agent never commits.
Most AGENTS.md files defend against imagined mistakes. Mine your own transcripts, count what the agent actually gets wrong, and let that decide what to write.