Loop Engineering Anti-Patterns
Use this page to reject unsafe, vague, or misleading loop designs.
Prompt Loop With No Contract
Symptom: A script repeatedly asks an agent to "keep improving" without a named objective, intake, state, verification, or exit condition.
Why it fails: The loop becomes a manual prompting habit disguised as automation.
Better: Define the loop contract before running: objective, trigger, intake, workspace, context, delegation, verification, state, budget, escalation, and exit.
Infinite Retry Loop
Symptom: The loop keeps feeding failures back to the agent indefinitely.
Why it fails: Cost grows, context degrades, and the loop may repeatedly damage the same files.
Better: Set retry budgets per blocker, stop on repeated failures, and escalate with evidence.
Model Self-Approval
Symptom: The same agent that made the change decides that the work is complete.
Why it fails: Models can rationalize their own mistakes and miss regressions they introduced.
Better: Use deterministic checks, a separate verifier agent, or human review for completion gates.
Hidden State
Symptom: The only memory is inside the conversation.
Why it fails: The next run cannot reliably know what was tried, what passed, what failed, or what remains.
Better: Persist state in files, issues, comments, checkpoints, traces, or workflow state.
Unsafe Production Autonomy
Symptom: A loop can deploy, roll back, change config, rotate secrets, or modify data without explicit approval boundaries.
Why it fails: A small model error can become an operational incident.
Better: Make sensitive actions approval-gated and document rollback, escalation, and owner rules.
Generic Automation Rebranded As Loop Engineering
Symptom: A cron job or workflow runs without agentic reasoning, context loading, verification, or stateful next-action decisions.
Why it fails: It blurs Loop Engineering with ordinary automation.
Better: Call ordinary automation ordinary automation. Use Loop Engineering when repeated agent work is actually being triggered, bounded, verified, persisted, and rerun.
Context Dump Loop
Symptom: Each run gives the agent a huge context bundle instead of a curated state contract.
Why it fails: The loop becomes slow, expensive, and hard to debug.
Better: Separate durable state from supporting context. Load only the state, docs, examples, and receipts needed for the current objective.
No Escalation Path
Symptom: The loop keeps acting even when it lacks credentials, sees ambiguous product requirements, hits flaky infrastructure, or needs architectural judgment.
Why it fails: The agent spends budget where a human decision is required.
Better: Define escalation triggers and include the evidence a human needs to take over.
No Receipts
Symptom: The loop says it is done without commands, logs, changed files, trace IDs, dashboard snapshots, reviewer decisions, or links.
Why it fails: Maintainers cannot audit the loop or trust its result.
Better: Require receipts as part of the exit gate.