loop-engineering

1# COG Loop Engineering
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3> **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.
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5This 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.
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7## Why loops
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9A 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.
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11## The COG loop
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13```
14   ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
15   │  1. Gather    pull context (vault + sources)   │
16   │  2. Act       one step: search / fetch / scan  │
17   │  3. Observe   read the real result             │
18   │  4. Verify    run the deterministic check      │
19   │  5. Update    write progress to a vault file   │
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