Loop Ops — outer-loop design discipline

A loop is not a prompt. Turn-by-turn prompting puts you in the loop forever. Loop engineering inverts it: you design a recurring process with memory, verification, and boundaries that discovers work, hands it to agents, verifies the result, and decides — on a schedule or until a goal is met — whether to land it or escalate to a human.

This is the outer loop above a single agent run, the twin of iterate (the inner loop); it composes what this repo already ships rather than reimplementing it: references/composition-map.md.

Native primitives schedule; loop-ops governs

Claude Code now ships the cadence half natively. Do not hand-roll a scheduler — pick a native host, declare it as host: in the config, and spend the discipline where the primitives leave a hole. Verified surface, parameters and limits (2026-08-30): references/native-scheduling.md.

/loop (session-scoped, 7-day expiry, L1 only) · Desktop scheduled tasks (durable local, worktree toggle off by default) · cloud routines (machine-off, 1 h floor, no permission mode, every connector attached) · /goal (a completion gate, not a cadence). Gives vs lacks: references/native-primitives-at-a-glance.md.