Certification
Loop Ready Certification
The graduation criteria for this entire course. Where the final exam tests what you know and the capstone rubric grades one loop you built, this page…
The graduation criteria for this entire course. Where the final exam tests what you know and the capstone rubric grades one loop you built, this page is the single bar every track's exit assessment has been building toward: the Loop Ready checklist, applied for real, to a loop you can point at.
What "Loop Ready" means
Per loop-plan.md §17, Loop Ready is an interactive, seven-item checklist — the same
seven items this repo's own minimum-safe checklist has required of
every loop since Day 1, and the same seven the
loop design checklist walks you through filling
in:
| # | Item | What proves it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Success condition | Written as a spec, verified against real output — not asserted |
| 2 | Run limit | A number in the design, and evidence it was respected across the submitted run history |
| 3 | Isolated branch/worktree | The loop never edited the primary working tree directly during a fix/write beat |
| 4 | Read-only checker | A checker that is provably separate from the maker, with zero write access |
| 5 | State file | A spine, committed before beat 1, with a real (not fabricated) history |
| 6 | Human gate | Named explicitly, placed where judgment or an irreversible action concentrates |
| 7 | A log/notification | One line per beat, including "nothing happened" beats, in a shared or accessible log |
A score, not a pass/fail, is standard practice per the reference repo's own
loop-audit --badge tooling: each of the seven items scores present/absent/partial, and
the badge names the total. This course's own certification bar is all seven present,
not partial credit — a loop that's "mostly" isolated or "usually" logs isn't Loop Ready,
it's a loop with a known gap.
The certification path
What to submit for certification
- Evidence you cleared each track's exit assessment (T1→T4), per learning-tracks.md — this can be your own project submissions across Projects 1–8.
- A passing capstone rubric score (≥70) on your Project 8 loop.
- The Loop Ready checklist, filled in against that same loop, all seven items marked present with evidence — not just checked from memory.
- One written paragraph naming the loop's biggest remaining risk, even after certification — a certified loop is not a risk-free loop, and naming the risk honestly is itself part of the bar (this course's own "green ≠ done" rule, applied to the certificate).
What certification does not mean
- It does not mean the loop may run at L3 unattended — autonomy is still earned separately, per safety.md's ladder, one proven level at a time.
- It does not mean the loop is done forever — a certified loop still needs its budget watched, its checker re-evaluated (see evals-and-traces.md), and its spine read.
- It does not transfer to a different loop — certification is per-loop, not a credential that makes your next loop exempt from the same checklist.
When it goes wrong
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Certified loop breaks in its second week | Certification checked the loop's design, not its ongoing operation | Pair certification with the observability discipline — read the spine and log weekly, not just once |
| Checklist marked complete without real evidence | Self-certified against memory, not artifacts | Require the same artifacts the capstone rubric requires — spine, log, checker output |
| "Loop Ready" used to justify skipping L1 | Certification conflated with autonomy | Keep the two separate — certification proves the design; the autonomy ladder is proven separately, by history |
Sources: the Loop Ready checklist and score-not-pass/fail convention come from
loop-plan.md §17, the reference repo's own loop-audit/loop-init tooling
(S7, MIT), and Panaversity's Loop
Engineering: A Crash Course
(S1); the
track progression it certifies is documented in full in
learning-tracks.md. Full attribution:
resources/sources.md.