Foundations
Foundations
The vocabulary and mental models the rest of the course leans on. Read these once and the six parts of a loop stop being jargon.
The vocabulary and mental models the rest of the course leans on. Read these once and the six parts of a loop stop being jargon.
Loop engineering is the practice of designing the system that prompts an AI agent — its trigger, instructions, guardrails, verification, state, and logging — rather than prompting it by hand. This section defines that system before you build one.
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Concepts | The core ideas, in the order they build on each other |
| Glossary | Every term the course uses, defined once |
| The four layers | Harness, loop, agent, and model — and what lives where |
| Mental models | How to reason about a loop you cannot watch run |
| Primitives | The building blocks a loop composes |
| Primitives matrix | Which primitive to reach for, side by side |
The six parts of a loop
Every production loop declares all six. A loop missing one of these is the loop that surprises you at 3am.
- Heartbeat — the trigger that starts a beat: in-session, conditional, scheduled, or event-driven.
- Body — the capabilities it may use: files, tools, skills, connectors (MCP).
- Spine — durable state between runs. With a spine an interrupted loop resumes; without one it restarts.
- Stopping condition — a machine-checkable definition of done: success, limit, or no-progress.
- Checker — the separate reviewer of the output. A loop never grades its own work.
- Human gate — the placed decision a person must make before anything ships.
Next: Part 1 — The Shift · Back to the course.