Building the Loop Around the Agent

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Years before any of this had a name, I had a script on my homelab box that restarted a flaky transcode job, checked the log for a specific error string, and gave up after five tries instead of running all night. It was maybe fifteen lines of PowerShell, later rewritten in Rust once I got tired of PowerShell’s startup time on that box. The retry logic was never the interesting part. The giving-up logic was. A script that retries forever isn’t automation, it’s a slow-motion outage with a delay timer.

Loop-Engineering on David R. Longnecker - Converting Coffee to Code

Building the Loop Around the Agent