The Spine

Part 4 · The Spine

One step, one organ, one unbending rule: the model forgets, so the files have to remember. This is the briefest part of the whole course — and the one…

The spine, memory between runs: the model forgets but the repo does not — each run reads the spine first, does the work, updates the spine last. No spine, no loop

One step, one organ, one unbending rule: the model forgets, so the files have to remember. This is the briefest part of the whole course — and the one whose absence quietly kills more loops than anything else.

The step

Step	Page	One-line takeaway
12	State Between Runs	constitution + diary, updated every beat, committed — resume, never restart

Why this part fits on one page

Because the discipline itself is tiny and non-negotiable. Every loop in this repo lives by it, and you can check their homework: each loops/*/state.md is a spine you can open right now. The Day 1 reconstruction notices are the cautionary half — they record, in the loops' own words, what happens when the rule gets skipped. With heartbeat, body, and spine all in hand, you're finally equipped to assemble the whole creature — Part 5 builds one loop twice, once in each tool.

Check your understanding

Take the Part 4 quiz · drill the flashcards

This part belongs to track T2 · Practitioner.

Sources: Part 4 draws on Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1), Agentic Coding Crash Course (S2), and Sydney Runkle's The Art of Loop Engineering (S6). Full attribution: resources/sources.md.