pattern-autonomous-loop

Pattern: Autonomous loop (hands-off pipeline to a terminal success gate)

Chain a multi-step workflow end-to-end without human checkpoints, self-correcting on failure until a terminal success condition is met — then stop and hand back. The defining features are (a) no between-step approval, (b) a machine-checkable stopping gate (CI green, tests pass, QA clean) rather than “looks done”, and (c) automatic retry/repair when a step fails.

Compound Engineering’s lfg is the archetype: after a brainstorm it runs plan → work → simplify → review-with-fixes → test → commit → push → open PR → watch CI until green, returning only when the PR is merge-ready. ce-dogfood applies the same shape scoped to QA: hands-off browser testing that fixes small breakages on its own and reports what it repaired.

Why it’s distinctive

Most frameworks here are human-checkpointed by design — GSD, Addy, BMAD, Spec Kit stop between phases for a human to review. The autonomous loop is the opposite stance: trust the guardrails (pattern-worktree-isolation, a bounded plan, a hard success gate) enough to remove the human from the inner loop. It trades interactive control for throughput, and depends on the quality of the upstream planning (the 80/20 front-load) to be safe. Nearest relatives: Addy’s /build auto (runs an approved plan task-by-task without per-task approval) and BMAD’s bmad-quick-dev dev-auto unattended path — both are narrower, single-stage autonomies; lfg is the whole lifecycle.

Applied by (backlinks)

Compound Engineering:

• lfg — full plan-to-green-PR autonomous pipeline with CI watch.
• ce-dogfood — autonomous diff-scoped browser QA with self-repair.

gstack (scoped autonomies rather than a whole-lifecycle loop):

• gstack-qa — self-fixing find→fix→verify browser QA that leaves a regression test per fix.
• gstack-ios-fix — autonomous iOS bug fixer with regression-snapshot capture.
• gstack-canary — post-deploy monitoring loop watching for errors/regressions.

Enabled by (infrastructure)

The process-layer loops above are skills that instruct an agent; the execution layer is where the loop becomes runtime machinery — the purpose-built home for “AFK” (away-from-keyboard) agents:

• sandcastle (library) — a bounded AFK run() with a machine-checkable stop (completionSignal), iteration cap (maxIterations), idle/completion timeouts, and exec-gated success checks (e.g. npm test before a review run). The simple-loop template is the archetype.
• warren (platform) — the entire product is the loop: dispatch → sandbox → validate → push → open PR → spin down, plus cron triggers and serial plan-runs that gate each child on the previous PR merging.

See Also

• pattern-worktree-isolation — the safety substrate that makes unattended runs non-destructive.
• bmad-quick-dev — BMAD’s unattended fast path (single-stage analogue).
• compound-engineering — the framework applying this pattern.
• sandcastle · warren — the runtimes purpose-built to host AFK autonomous runs.