loop-designer

From Prompter to Loop Designer

A loop designer builds a system that prompts itself -- runs on a timer, checks its own work against a goal, spawns helpers when needed, and writes down what it learned so the next run starts smarter. This skill distills Alex (@de1lymoon)'s 10-step roadmap into concrete Hermes Agent invocations.

This is NOT about better prompting. It does NOT cover model selection, fine-tuning, or prompt engineering. The model stays the same throughout -- what improves is the Hermes infrastructure wrapped around it.

When to Use

• You are building an agent that should run unattended on a schedule
• You have a working manual workflow and want to automate it
• You want the system to remember past runs and improve over time
• You need to build a fail-safe autonomous loop
• You are debugging why your automated agent stops improving after initial gains

When Not to Use

• The task takes under 5 minutes and runs less than weekly. The setup cost of a dedicated profile, goal_judge wiring, state log, and cron job exceeds the manual effort for months or years. A simple cron job or calendar reminder is a better fit.
• The task requires irreversible production writes without a human gate. Deployments, database migrations, and user-facing content changes must have a human approval step. The loop can prepare and verify, but should not execute alone.
• The task's environment changes faster than the loop's value compounds. If the target (dashboard, API, website) changes layout or contract weekly, the loop spends more time debugging failures than the manual task would take. The compounding benefit of memory and skills only helps when the environment is stable enough for lessons to accumulate.
• You can't define a clear "done" condition. Without a goal_judge verdict or measurable acceptance criteria, the loop has no way to know when to stop. Loops without a stop condition drift into token-wasting oscillation.
• You're building it to learn loop design, not to solve a problem. That's valid — build a throwaway loop on a synthetic task first. The Verification section spells out what graduating looks like.