Loop Engineering
Bounded state machines, termination contracts, recovery, idempotency, budgets, no-progress detection, and replayable agent loops.
Quick start
Reach one useful result first
- Explain
- 40 min
- Visualize
- 30 min
- Practice
- 65 min
- Deep dive
- 75 min
Explanation
Start with the direct answer, follow one example, then check your understanding.
Choose your explanation depth
The mechanism stays the same; emphasis and evidence change.
Loop engineering turns repeated model decisions into a bounded, recoverable, observable transition system with explicit terminal behavior.
Carried example
A research task can search until it finds one cited answer. Represent running, succeeded, failed, and exhausted states; decrement a call budget; verify the citation before finishing.
Focus on the visible input, the change, and the output of Loop Engineering. No code is required for this pass.
Learning goals and prerequisites
After this lesson
- Model a bounded execution loop
- Design termination and recovery contracts
- Evaluate trajectories, effects, and replay
Helpful before starting
- Agent and tool-use fundamentals
- Typed application state
- Testing and API error handling
5 chapters · about 1 hr 2 min estimated study
0/5 chapters marked complete
Bounded state machines, termination contracts, recovery, idempotency, budgets, no-progress detection, and replayable agent loops. Loop engineering turns repeated model decisions into a bounded, recoverable, observable transition system with explicit terminal behavior.
Keep one example in view throughout this lesson: A research task can search until it finds one cited answer. Represent running, succeeded, failed, and exhausted states; decrement a call budget; verify the citation before finishing.
Ideas to understand
- Typed state, actions, observations, and terminal reasons.
- Deterministic workflow versus model decision boundaries.
- Success, failure, cancellation, and deadline semantics.
Decision and failure guide
Use Loop Engineering with evidence
A complete explanation includes the conditions that make the technique useful and the nearby ways it can fail.
Before you call it ready
- Enforce budgets outside the model
- Verify success from state
- Reconcile writes before retrying
- Preserve evidence when breakers trip
Common failure → better decision
- Stopping when the model says it is done
- Verify a goal-specific postcondition.
- Retrying an uncertain write blindly
- Use idempotency and reconcile external state.
- Detecting loops from text alone
- Compare structured state, evidence, and effects.
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