SlipItIn/.agents/skills/loop-architect/references/control-rubric.md

Control Rubric

Use this when setting gates, iteration caps, budgets, and stop conditions.

Required Guards

• loop_control.max_iterations
• gates.*.max_revisions
• loop_control.no_progress.max_stalled_iterations
• At least one wall-clock, token, or USD budget cap when external models run. The generated Python runner enforces wall-clock caps directly; token and USD caps are advisory unless the chosen model CLI exposes accounting that the loop operator wires in separately.
• A stop condition that describes success.
• A stop condition that describes no-progress or repeated failure.

Good Gate Design

• Plan gate runs before delivery work.
• Delivery gate runs after each delivery artifact.
• Programmatic checks run before judge calls when possible.
• Human checkpoints sit at high-leverage points, usually after plan approval or before external egress.
• Resume happens at gate boundaries unless the user explicitly needs finer granularity.

Execution Boundary

• Name where the loop is allowed to modify files: current workspace, branch, worktree, throwaway directory, or an external orchestrator workspace.
• Identify actions with side effects: pushes, PR comments, Slack messages, deploys, file deletes, database writes, or vendor sends.
• Decide whether side-effecting actions require approval, idempotency notes, or duplicate-action checks.
• If the loop may run on a schedule or in parallel, call out the need for an external orchestrator with concurrency controls.

Failure Behavior

• Stop immediately when a hard cap is reached.
• Write the latest state to loop-workspace/state.json.
• Append each meaningful step, decision, check result, and blocker to loop-workspace/run-log.md.
• Preserve review notes even when the gate fails.
• Stop or ask the human when the same blocker repeats for the configured no-progress window.
• Do not let the host keep revising forever.

Anti-Patterns

• No maximum iteration count.
• A judge gate with no judge.
• A budget cap in prose but not in loop_control.
• No no-progress detector.
• A loop that can send duplicate external notifications or repeat destructive actions after restart.
• Scheduled or multi-agent work with no durable orchestrator or concurrency story.
• Human signoff required but no checkpoint.
• Stop conditions that require subjective self-satisfaction.