find-the-loop
Find the loop
The loop is the product and the agent is the motor. An agent with no trustworthy signal keeps changing code and asks the human whether it worked. That turns the human into the test runner, and progress stops. This skill runs before any iteration. It produces a Loop Card (templates/loop-card.md) that states what is measured, how the agent measures it without help, how noisy that measurement is, what counts as a win, and when to stop. Hand the finished card to whoever does the iterating, whether that is you, a child agent or experiment-arms.
When to use
- The task is iterative. Fix, speed up, reduce, improve, tune or hill-climb anything, including requests as vague as "make the editor feel snappier".
- A loop smell appears mid-session. Stop the current work and run this skill when you see any of these:
- The user has pasted 2 or more screenshots, logs or numbers they collected by hand.
- "still broken", "still slow" or "same thing" has come up twice.
- You are about to write "please try it", "let me know if it works" or "start it now" without having run it yourself.
- A percentage improvement is claimed from a single run (n=1), or no baseline exists.
- The human reports a measurement such as "still 3 fps" or "CI took 40 min". They are acting as the instrument.
- Three or more fix attempts have failed with no new signal between them.
Do not use it for one-shot mechanical edits (renames, copy changes, config bumps) where existing CI already proves correctness. Do not use it when a Loop Card already exists for this outcome; reuse that card and update the baseline instead. Do not force a loop onto build-mode work: a large new prototype often has no signal to climb yet. File issues, run them in parallel with autonomous-delivery, and come back here once there's something real to measure.