design-control-loop
Design Control Loop
Use this skill when a user wants to drive some property of their codebase toward a target with small, low-risk, reviewable changes on a schedule — an agentic control loop.
Your job is to interview the user, design the loop with them, and then build it for them. The design must be tailored to their codebase and the tooling they already use. There is no fixed toolset and no template to reproduce: propose options grounded in what you find in the repo, discuss trade-offs, agree on a design, then implement it.
The mental model
Borrow from control theory. The codebase is a dynamic system being changed continuously (by teammates, dependencies, and generated code — the disturbances). A control loop drives it toward a desired state instead of all at once:
- Set point — the desired end state for some property of the codebase.
- Sensor — measures the current state, producing the gap to the set point.
- Controller — decides the next small, low-risk change from that measurement.
- Actuator — a coding agent that applies the change and opens a PR.
- The result feeds back into the next run. A human stays on the loop to steer it.
Read references/control-loop-taxonomy.md and walk the user through these concepts before designing anything. For one fully worked example, see references/example-control-loop.md — treat it as an illustration, not a blueprint.