The Spine
Part 4 Flashcards · The Spine
Ten cards on the loop's memory. Cover the right column, answer aloud, flip.
Ten cards on the loop's memory. Cover the right column, answer aloud, flip.
| # | Front | Back |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The intern's-diary metaphor | a gifted intern who forgets each night: don't cure the amnesia — give them a diary read first thing, written last |
| 2 | The two files that make a spine | rules file (constitution — you write it, rarely changes) + progress file (diary — the loop writes it, every beat) |
| 3 | The beat order that protects the spine | work → verify → update the spine → log |
| 4 | An uncommitted spine is… | already lost. Commit every beat — durability is the entire point |
| 5 | What is spine drift? | the spine claims "done" while the world disagrees — caused by ticking the box before verifying |
| 6 | "One owner per spine" means | each loop writes only its own state file; everyone else is read-only on it |
| 7 | Record vs. scratchpad | escalations, mismatches, and lessons belong in the spine — it's what the next beat and the human read |
| 8 | Resume vs. restart | the whole reason spines exist: an interruption costs one unit of work, not the entire run |
| 9 | What is hill-climbing? | a slower loop reads the spine's lessons and upgrades the rules/skills — the loop that improves the loop |
| 10 | Self-learning vs. self-improving | piling up lessons (safe, always) vs. editing your own prompt/rules (put every change behind a human gate) |
Drill, then: Part 4 quiz · Part 5
Sources: these cards test Part 4, drawn from Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1) and Agentic Coding Crash Course (S2). Full attribution: resources/sources.md.