The Spine
Part 4 Quiz · The Spine
One organ, five questions — because it's the organ whose absence kills the most loops. The bar for moving on is 4 of 5.
One organ, five questions — because it's the organ whose absence kills the most loops. The bar for moving on is 4 of 5.
Question 1
"Continue from where you left off" is already in the prompt, yet the restarted loop re-ran beats 1–6 anyway. Why, and what's the structural fix (Step 12)?
Show answer
"Where you left off" lived in the model's memory, and that memory ended at the crash — beats are amnesiac. Fix: a progress file read at the start of the beat, updated and committed at the end. Resume-vs-restart has to ride on files, never on memory.
Question 2
Constitution vs. diary: which file is which, who writes each, and how often does each change?
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Constitution = the rules file (CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md): written by the human, read every
beat, edited rarely. Diary = the progress file (state.md): written by the loop (one owner
per file), updated on every single beat.
Question 3
Why is the order work → verify → update spine → log load-bearing? What breaks if you update the spine first?
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The spine may only record what is actually true. Update it first and an interruption (or a failed verification) leaves it claiming work that never happened — that's spine drift, the "spine says done, world disagrees" failure. Work-first means an interruption costs at most a log line, and the next beat simply redoes one unit.
Question 4
This repo's Day 1 spines existed and were faithfully updated — and are partly lost anyway. What discipline was missing, and what's the moral?
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They were never committed (gitignored, then lost) — updates without durability. The moral, straight from the reconstruction notice: a spine that isn't committed isn't a spine. Day 2's loops commit on every beat, which is exactly why their history survived intact.
Question 5
Self-learning vs. self-improving loops: define both, and say which one needs a human gate on every change.
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Self-learning: the spine accumulates facts and lessons — safe, do it from day one. Self-improving: the loop edits its own prompt/rules/skills (hill-climbing) — powerful, and every such change goes through human review, because a loop rewriting its own constitution unreviewed is an unbounded system.
Next: Part 5 · A Complete Loop, Twice · flashcards
Sources: this quiz tests Part 4, drawn from Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1) and Agentic Coding Crash Course (S2). Full attribution: resources/sources.md.