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Three quick questions. Answer them honestly and skip straight to the section that matches — there's no prize for reading in order.

1. Have you actually finished Loop Engineering?

Think about the smallest loop-engineering setup there is: one agent, one file it consults on the way in and updates on the way out, nobody else anywhere near either end. If you can name what makes that file the loop's "spine" on the spot, and explain why a heartbeat isn't the same thing as a maker grading its own homework, you're solid — move to question 2.

If that paragraph felt shaky, go read the loop engineering primer before anything else. It's a recap, not the full course, but it will tell you fast whether you need to go back and actually finish Loop Engineering first.

2. Have you actually finished Harness Engineering?

Same test, different vocabulary: could you explain, off the top of your head, the difference between a harness that verifies an agent's output and one that corrects it? Between correcting and escalating?

If not, the harness engineering primer is your next stop. This course assumes that vocabulary is already comfortable — a graph is one of the things a harness's checking stage leans on, and that connection won't make sense without it.

3. Are you here to build a graph, or to find out if you need one?

If both prerequisites felt solid, the honest next question is what you're actually trying to do today:

  • "I have more than one loop and they're stepping on each other." You're ready for the real content — go to Part 1, The Memory Problem and start the core path.
  • "I'm not sure a graph is worth the trouble yet." Skip ahead to Part 7, Staying Grounded and read the skip-decision material first. There's no shame in a spreadsheet if a spreadsheet is genuinely the right tool.
  • "Neither — I just want the words defined." The Foundations section — glossary, mental models, the two-graph split, and comprehension debt — will get you oriented without committing to either path yet.

Whichever answer fits, you can always come back here — this page doesn't move, and it never assumes you remember which branch you took last time.