The Shift
Part 1 Quiz · The Shift
Five questions, each answer hidden until you commit to one. The bar for moving on is 4 of 5 without peeking. A wrong answer points you straight at the…
Five questions, each answer hidden until you commit to one. The bar for moving on is 4 of 5 without peeking. A wrong answer points you straight at the step to re-read.
Question 1
You prompt an agent 30 times a day, every day. A colleague insists you're "already doing loop engineering." Per Step 1, what one sentence refutes that?
Show answer
Looping means the deciding, remembering, and stopping are engineered to happen without you — 30 manual prompts means you are still, personally, the heartbeat, the spine, and the stop. Volume of prompting is not a system.
Question 2
A loop keeps committing directly to main despite the prompt saying "always use a branch."
Per Step 2, which layer should hold this rule, and why?
Show answer
The harness (permissions/hooks/branch protection). Prose rules are requests the model can misread or deprioritize; the harness enforces mechanically and cannot be persuaded. Guarantees live in the harness — judgment lives in the loop.
Question 3
Name the six parts of a loop — and for two of them, the failure that shows up when that part is missing (Step 3).
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Heartbeat, body, spine, stopping condition, checker, human gate. Missing-part failures (any two): no spine → restart-from-zero; no stop → runs forever; no checker → maker grades itself and co-signs its own bugs; no gate → work ships with no accountable owner; no body limits → unscoped blast radius.
Question 4
Which of these is a provable stopping condition? (a) "stop when the docs read well" ·
(b) "stop when every box in state.md is checked" · (c) "stop when you're confident" ·
(d) "stop after doing a good amount"
Show answer
(b) — a fact a machine can verify by reading a file. The other three are feelings wearing quotation marks; a loop can neither prove them nor be safely left alone with them.
Question 5
What do you keep, and what do you hand over, in the shift from prompting to looping?
Show answer
You hand over the management — picking the next unit, dispatching it, remembering progress, deciding when to stop. You keep intent and accountability: what "good" means, review of what ships, and answering for the result. A loop inherits your typing, never your judgment.
Scored under 4? Re-read the step named in the question, then retake. Ready to move on: Part 2 · The Heartbeat · flashcards
Sources: this quiz tests Part 1, drawn from Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1) and Addy Osmani's Loop Engineering (S5). Full attribution: resources/sources.md.