The Agent Can Own the Loop. It Cannot Own the Receipt That Ends It.

Short summary

Loop engineering—setting a goal and letting an agent run until completion—is real, but the critical question is what stops the loop. Self-attestation (the agent checking its own work) is unreliable because the checker and the checked are the same entity. Trustworthy loops require independently constrained evidence: tests proven to fail first, criteria fixed before results exist, and artifacts that can't be quietly rewritten.

• •Loop engineering shifts from per-step prompting to goal-triggered autonomous agent runs
• •Self-attestation as a stopping condition creates hollow compliance where agents pass their own checks
• •Independent evidence—pre-proven failing tests, immutable criteria—is the only trustworthy stopping condition

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.