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loop-engineering

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Shared loop-engineering reference for COG skills - the agent loop, deterministic verifiers, termination conditions, in-loop context management, and named patterns. Invoke when designing or debugging a skill that iterates (search-verify-retry, scan-until-dry, fetch-retry-gate).

skills/loop-engineering/SKILL.md

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# COG Loop Engineering

> **TL;DR:** Some COG skills are not one-shot prompts. They are loops: act, observe, verify, decide whether to continue. This skill is the shared vocabulary those skills use. The iron rule: **trust deterministic checks, never the agent's own "looks done" self-report.** Every loop must declare its verifier, its stopping conditions, and which pattern it follows.

This is a reference and design aid, not a content-generating workflow. Skills that loop (daily-brief, knowledge-consolidation, url-dump, weekly-checkin, and research/triage skills like auto-research and scout) link here instead of restating the rules. Invoke it directly when you are building or fixing an iterative skill.

## Why loops

A chain runs fixed steps: A then B then C. A loop is dynamic: the agent takes an action, reads real feedback (a fetched page, a date stamp, a file count), reasons about it, and repeats until a goal is met or a stop condition fires. Most knowledge-work that "keeps going until good enough" is a loop, and COG benefits from naming the loop explicitly rather than hoping a single prompt nails it.

## The COG loop

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