Lesson 10 · Capstone · Agentic Loop Engineering

Your Project's Verification Loop

Everything in this course, compressed into one design procedure — and a worksheet that turns your answers into a concrete loop plan you can hand straight back to your teacher to build.

⏱ ~15 min with your real project🎯 The mission's finish line

1 · The design procedure

  1. Write the definition of done for the work this project's sessions usually do — observable statements, not adjectives. (Lesson 2's two-expert test applies.)
  2. Enumerate the failure modes you actually fear. Not hypotheticals — the ways this project has burned you. Each one names a verifier need.
  3. For each failure mode, pick the cheapest verifier that catches it — leftmost on the taxonomy that genuinely covers the failure. Deterministic if the question is factual; calibrated judgment only where judgment is the question.
  4. Pick the gate by cost-of-wrong-done (Lesson 9's table): Gate 1 by default, promote to /goal, Stop hook, or subagent the first time absence bites — or immediately for must-never-slip checks.
  5. Build the smallest version — one hook script, one agent file, one ride-along prompt. Resist building the whole stack on day one.
  6. Verify the verifier: deliberately break the thing it guards and confirm it fires. (Both demo battle scars — the stderr noise, the zero-match trap — were caught exactly this way.)
  7. Watch for gaming and rot: tests edited to pass, goldens blindly regenerated, flaky gates, unbounded reviewers. Re-run step 6 occasionally.
The whole course in one sentence: give the agent a pass/fail signal it cannot argue with, make the signal's failure output actionable, gate "done" on it in proportion to the stakes — and verify the verifier.

2 · The worksheet

Fill it in for a real project. The generator assembles a markdown loop plan — definition of done, failure-mode → verifier → gate table, and the starter files to create. Copy it and paste it to me in chat; I'll build the files with you.


      
      
    

  


  
3 · What happens next

  
Paste the plan into our chat and say "build it." I'll write the actual files — the hook script tuned to your test runner, the diff-grader rubric bound to your definition of done, the ledger if you chose the long horizon — and we'll verify each verifier by deliberately breaking something, just like the demos. That working loop in your real repo is the mission's success condition.


  
💬 This lesson is the handoff point, not the end. The wisdom layer — comparing your loop designs against other practitioners' — lives in the communities in RESOURCES.md (r/ClaudeAI, r/ClaudeCode); your loop plans make excellent posts there.


  
Where to go next