Project 8 · Your Own Daily Loop (Capstone)

⚠️ Throwaway repo. Set a limit first. This is the graduation project — run it against a real repo of yours, but still behind a worktree/branch boundary until it's earned an L2 history, and cap every guardrail explicitly before beat one.

The scenario

You've built five focused labs, each exercising one or two of the six parts. The capstone asks for the whole thing, on a real job you actually have: pick a genuine recurring task from your own work — a real codebase (yours, your team's, or a well-scoped OSS project you contribute to) with a real, provable pain point. Some examples that have made strong capstones: a nightly dependency-freshness report for a service with 40+ dependencies; a "first-failing-test, fixed and re-verified" loop for a codebase with an intermittently red suite; a weekly stakeholder brief drafted from a real project's merged PRs and closed issues. The job matters less than this: it must be yours, provable, and something you'd actually want running tomorrow.

What you'll build

Every one of the six parts, deliberately chosen — not defaulted:

1. Heartbeat — schedule, conditional, or event; justify the choice against the job.
2. Body — the exact paths/tools it may touch; everything else read-only, enforced by the harness, not the prompt.
3. Spine — a state.md written and committed before beat 1.
4. Stopping condition — a spec, not an adjective; checkable by a script or a genuinely separate reader.
5. Checker — never the maker; script, read-only agent, or a documented human step.
6. Human gate — placed where judgment or an irreversible action concentrates.

Run the loop design checklist against your design before beat 1 — every box that resists a one-line answer is a design flaw to fix, not a detail to skip. Start at L1 report-only; earn any promotion the way safety.md describes — a proven history, a written decision.

# Claude Code — your own loop, shaped by your own checklist answers
> /loop <your heartbeat> <your body, scoped to your paths>. Stop when <your provable
  condition>. Checker: <your separate checker>. Log one line per beat to
  loop-run-log.md. Update <your-loop>-state.md every beat.

# OpenCode — same six parts, this tool's primitives
opencode run "<your body>" # wired to your chosen heartbeat mechanism
# checker as a separate `opencode run` invocation, or a plain script

Done when (provable stop)

• The filled-in loop design checklist is attached, every box answered (not left blank).
• <your-loop>-state.md exists, was committed before beat 1, and has a real, non-fabricated run history.
• The loop ran at least 3 real beats at L1 report-only, on the real job, and you can point at genuine output from each.
• The stopping condition, the limit, and the no-progress rule are all demonstrated — not just described.
• Graded against capstone-rubric.md — this project is not self-graded.

Going deeper

This capstone is Step 13 done for real, on your own problem, instead of the shared daily-triage example — go re-read Step 13 once more before you start, this time treating every sentence as a requirement for your loop rather than a worked example. When it's done, the loop-ready-certification is the formal close-out.

When it goes wrong

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Sources: the six-part shape and the "build it twice" capstone structure come from Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1), Step 13 and §18; the A–F method from make-your-own-loop.md. Full attribution: resources/sources.md.