Continuous Agent Loop#

Patterns for autonomous agent loops with quality gates and recovery.

Loop Selection#

Choose your loop type based on requirements:

text

Need strict CI/PR control?
  → continuous-pr

Need RFC decomposition?
  → rfc-dag

Need exploratory parallel generation?
  → infinite

Default → sequential

Production Stack (Recommended)#

1. RFC decomposition — break large requests into a DAG of sub-tasks before looping
2. Quality gates — define explicit pass/fail criteria before starting each loop iteration
3. Eval loop — run automated checks after each iteration to verify progress
4. Session persistence — checkpoint state between iterations so you can resume on failure

Key Patterns#

Sequential Loop:

• Single task → execute → verify → repeat
• Best for: stable, incremental work
• Recovery: freeze, audit, reduce scope

RFC-DAG Loop:

• Decompose request → parallel branches → merge results
• Best for: complex multi-part features
• Recovery: replay failing unit

CI/PR Loop:

• Generate → test → push PR → merge on pass
• Best for: code-heavy deliverables
• Recovery: fail fast, surface root cause

Infinite/Exploratory:

• Generate variants in parallel, filter winners
• Best for: creative or search-heavy work
• Recovery: cap iterations, tighten criteria

Failure Modes & Recovery#

ProblemRoot CauseFixLoop churnVague acceptance criteriaFreeze & redefine criteriaRepeated retriesSame root cause ignoredRun harness audit (see scripts/harness-audit.js), fix rootMerge queue stallsTest flakes or depsIsolate failing unitCost driftUnbounded escalationCap token budget per loop

Recovery checklist:

• Freeze loop
• Run node scripts/harness-audit.js — scores 7 categories (tool coverage, quality gates, evals, security, cost efficiency, memory, context)
• Reduce scope to failing unit
• Replay with explicit criteria

References#

• scripts/harness-audit.js — deterministic audit script, scores repo 0-70 across 7 categories
• references/harness-audit.md — full command usage and output contract