Autopsy of an Agentic Loop (pt.1)
Table of Contents
- From a loop to a team
- The three endings
- The cast
- The graph
- The brief
- The architect’s tools
- The model proposes, the code decides
- When a check fails: the code or the test?
- Thinking, only where it is needed
- The loops, and their bounds
- The journal: how roles talk to each other
- The job, and who holds the keys
- One engine, many projects
- LangGraph: what is used, and what is not
- Case study: Python 3.15 on flask
- First act: the engine dies with the application
- Second act: a repair in 7 minutes and 37 seconds
- What the case shows
- How it got here: a day of corrections
- Six replays of the same pull request
- Who watches the engine
- What it costs
- Reflections
- What is still missing
- Conclusion
Well, here we are again. The first version of this engine was a loop: a writer, two reviewers, a judge for failing tests, a test steward, a documentation reviewer, all around a set of checks. It worked, and then it started to fail in ways a loop fails: one reviewer call that hung for twenty minutes, a writer that used eight rounds and proposed nothing, roles that sent the same change back to each other over and over, and a run that lasted 49 minutes.









