OCCA

Karpathy said something you'll regret ignoring: "Remove yourself as the bottleneck. Maximize your leverage. Put in very few tokens, and a huge amount of stuff happens on your behalf." Loop engineering is the exact thing that does that. In a hand-run session, the operator handles two things: - deciding what the agent runs next - and checking its output before the next step Both are manual, and both decide how far the agent gets on its own without the operator. Loop engineering moves both steps into the system. A core operating structure surrounds the loop, and the diagram below depicts it. - A schedule decides what to run - Loop is the maker that produces the work - A separate checker agent grades the output - A file on disk holds the state they both read. The loop runs until either done, max iterations, or an exhausted budget. Here are some practical engineering considerations: 1) A model grading its own output justifies what it already did instead of catching where it failed. That's why a separate checker's findings return to the maker as the next instruction. And the cycle repeats until the checker finds nothing left to fix. 2) A loop with no stop condition burns tokens, and the cost climbs fast once sub-agents and long runs add up. That's why the exit must be set before the loop runs, not while it is running. A simple exit could be: ↳ fix only the major issues, run one final pass, and stop after two loops, with "all tests pass and lint clean" as the rule that ends it. 3) State has to live on disk, not in context. The model forgets everything between runs, so an MD file or a knowledge graph holds what is done and what is still open. Each run reads it and writes back to it, which lets a loop pick up again after days. 4) The lower the verification bar, the safer the loop. Boring, repetitive checks like a stale version string or a missing test are trivial to verify, so a loop runs them with little risk while the operator is away. Judgment-heavy work is loopable too, but only as far as the checker can confirm the result. Let's look at how an unattended loop fails in two ways. 1) It reports done when nothing is actually verified. The separate checker exists to prevent it, but it merges code faster than anyone reads it, so over weeks, the team stops understanding its own codebase while every check stays green. Green tests say the code passed the tests, not that anyone knows what shipped. Someone still has to read what the loop merges. 2) The checker keeps a running loop honest, but it only catches failures inside a run. The harness around the loop, like the prompts, tools, and checks wrapped around the model, still drifts and breaks in production as models change. That repair loop is usually run by hand based on observability traces. My co-founder wrote a detailed walkthrough (with code) on making that harness repair itself, where a failing trace gets diagnosed, the fix is verified against the exact input that failed, and the failure is locked as a regression test so it cannot recur. Read it below.