Heartbeat
Part 2 Flashcards · The Heartbeat
Ten cards on the four heartbeats and their sharp edges. Cover the right column, answer aloud, flip.
Ten cards on the four heartbeats and their sharp edges. Cover the right column, answer aloud, flip.
| # | Front | Back |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The four heartbeats | in-session interval · conditional (run-until-done) · unattended schedule · event-driven |
| 2 | In-session loop's defining property | dies with the session — watchable, interruptible, the training-wheels heartbeat |
| 3 | Missed beats are… | dropped, never queued — design beats to act on now, idempotently |
| 4 | Scheduler facts worth knowing (Claude Code cron tools) | ~50-task cap · ~3-day expiry · jitter · no catch-up |
| 5 | A conditional loop's heartbeat is… | the condition itself — beat, check, beat again until provably met |
| 6 | The doom loop, and its insurance | same fix retried forever; per-item retry caps + run limit + no-progress stop |
| 7 | The four parts of a routine | prompt · repos · connectors · trigger |
| 8 | The overnight branch guardrail | schedules may push only to a restricted namespace (e.g. claude/…) — never main; enforced by platform, not prose |
| 9 | Event loop + burst = missing beats. The fix? | a reconciliation sweep: slow scheduled loop that catches what events dropped |
| 10 | Channel-triggered loops: the security rule | anyone who can post holds your trigger — treat all inbound text as untrusted input, never as commands |
Drill, then: Part 2 quiz · Part 3
Sources: these cards test Part 2, drawn from Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1) and Scheduled Tasks: The Loop Skill & Cron Tools (S4). Full attribution: resources/sources.md.