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name: continuous-agent-loop description: Patterns for continuous autonomous agent loops with quality gates, evals, and recovery controls. origin: ECC

Continuous Agent Loop

This is the v1.8+ canonical loop skill name. It supersedes autonomous-loops while keeping compatibility for one release.

Loop Selection Flow

Start
  |
  +-- Need strict CI/PR control? -- yes --> continuous-pr
  |
  +-- Need RFC decomposition? -- yes --> rfc-dag
  |
  +-- Need exploratory parallel generation? -- yes --> infinite
  |
  +-- default --> sequential

Combined Pattern

Recommended production stack:

1. RFC decomposition (ralphinho-rfc-pipeline)
2. quality gates (plankton-code-quality + /quality-gate)
3. eval loop (eval-harness)
4. session persistence (nanoclaw-repl)

Failure Modes

• loop churn without measurable progress
• repeated retries with same root cause
• merge queue stalls
• cost drift from unbounded escalation

Recovery

• freeze loop
• run /harness-audit
• reduce scope to failing unit
• replay with explicit acceptance criteria