continuous-agent-loop

Canonical patterns for continuous autonomous agent loops with quality gates, evals, and recovery controls. Supports sequential, RFC, CI/PR, and exploratory loops. Trigger phrases: autonomous loop, continuous agent, quality gates, agent loop recovery, eval loop, session persistence. Adapted from everything-claude-code by @affaan-m (MIT)

Patterns for autonomous agent loops with quality gates and recovery.

Loop Selection

Choose your loop type based on requirements:

Need strict CI/PR control? 
  → continuous-pr

Need RFC decomposition?
  → rfc-dag

Need exploratory parallel generation?
  → infinite

Default → sequential

Production Stack (Recommended)

1. RFC decomposition — break large requests into a DAG of sub-tasks before looping
2. Quality gates — define explicit pass/fail criteria before starting each loop iteration
3. Eval loop — run automated checks after each iteration to verify progress
4. Session persistence — checkpoint state between iterations so you can resume on failure

Key Patterns

Sequential Loop:

• Single task → execute → verify → repeat
• Best for: stable, incremental work
• Recovery: freeze, audit, reduce scope

RFC-DAG Loop:

• Decompose request → parallel branches → merge results
• Best for: complex multi-part features
• Recovery: replay failing unit

CI/PR Loop:

• Generate → test → push PR → merge on pass
• Best for: code-heavy deliverables
• Recovery: fail fast, surface root cause

Infinite/Exploratory:

• Generate variants in parallel, filter winners
• Best for: creative or search-heavy work
• Recovery: cap iterations, tighten criteria

Failure Modes & Recovery

Problem	Root Cause	Fix
Loop churn	Vague acceptance criteria	Freeze & redefine criteria
Repeated retries	Same root cause ignored	Run harness audit (see scripts/harness-audit.js), fix root
Merge queue stalls	Test flakes or deps	Isolate failing unit
Cost drift	Unbounded escalation	Cap token budget per loop

Recovery checklist:

• Freeze loop
• Run node scripts/harness-audit.js — scores 7 categories (tool coverage, quality gates, evals, security, cost efficiency, memory, context)
• Reduce scope to failing unit
• Replay with explicit criteria

References

• scripts/harness-audit.js — deterministic audit script, scores repo 0-70 across 7 categories
• references/harness-audit.md — full command usage and output contract