Heartbeat
Part 2 Quiz · The Heartbeat
Five questions across the four heartbeats. The bar for moving on is 4 of 5.
Five questions across the four heartbeats. The bar for moving on is 4 of 5.
Question 1
Your laptop slept through four scheduled beats of an in-session loop. How many catch-up beats fire on wake, and why is that the correct design (Step 4)?
Show answer
Zero — missed beats are dropped, not queued. Correct, because a beat should act on now, not replay a stale past; four queued beats would stampede against a world that has moved on. Design beats to be idempotent over current state and misses cost you nothing.
Question 2
Write the three stops for "make the lint pass" as a conditional loop (Step 5).
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Success: lint exits 0 (provable). Limit: max N runs (say 10) — doom-loop insurance. No
progress: lint error count unchanged for 3 consecutive beats → log and stop. All three are
facts; none are feelings.
Question 3
Name the four parts of any unattended routine, and the two guardrails that make "nobody watching" acceptable (Step 6).
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Parts: prompt, repos, connectors, trigger. Guardrails (any two of): daily run caps; a
restricted branch namespace (e.g. only claude/-prefixed pushes, never main); starting
L1 report-only until the loop has earned writes over real watched mornings.
Question 4
An event-driven PR-review loop silently skipped three PRs during a release-day burst — no errors anywhere. Diagnose and prescribe (Step 7).
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The burst exceeded the event cap and overflow events were dropped, not queued — no error because nothing failed; the beats never existed. Prescription: a reconciliation sweep — a slow scheduled loop asking "what did the events miss?" (e.g. "any open PR without my review?") so silent gaps become caught gaps.
Question 5
Match the job to the heartbeat: (a) "empty this 30-item checklist" · (b) "brief me every morning" · (c) "respond when a release is tagged" · (d) "watch the tests while I refactor this afternoon."
Show answer
(a) conditional run-until-done · (b) unattended schedule · (c) event-driven (+ reconciliation sweep) · (d) in-session interval — it should die with your session, that's the feature.
Next: Part 3 · The Body · flashcards
Sources: this quiz tests 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.