three-stage-evolution

A three-stage model for judging how a person or team works with AI coding tools: writing code with suggestions, managing several conversations manually, or running an automated system that starts work itself.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess AI working habits, decide what to learn next, or evaluate a team's current level of AI use.
Why use it?
It shows where the current bottleneck is and prevents teams from treating more automation as the only form of progress.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kangarooking/loop-engineering-skill/three-stage-evolution
Any agent
npx skills add kangarooking/loop-engineering-skill --skill three-stage-evolution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kangarooking/loop-engineering-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,530 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00107 $0.01530
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00765
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00306
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00153

Measured 2d ago against content hash d188682ead69, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

three-stage-evolution scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

three-stage-evolution/SKILL.md · 110 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 110 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Source Metadata

Original cangjie-skill frontmatter from the distillation run:

name: three-stage-evolution
description: |
  评估个人或团队在 AI 工具使用上的进化阶段,给出下一步提升建议。
  当用户想判断"我现在 AI 用得怎么样"、"下一步该学什么"、或团队要做 AI 能力评估时使用。
  不适用于: 已经处于 Loop 阶段需要优化具体系统的场景。
  关键 trigger: "我现在在哪个阶段"、"AI 使用下一步"、"团队 AI 能力评估"。
source_book: "Loop Engineering 视频合集"
source_chapter: 视频3 (小木头) / 视频2 (Boris Cherny)
tags: [evolution, self-assessment, capability-model, growth]
related_skills: [loop-build-path, loop-worthiness-test, comprehension-gap]

三阶段进化模型 — 定位你的 AI 使用阶段

R — Reading (原文)

"第一阶段,逐行驾驶...你手写代码模型给你自动补全。第二个阶段,并行手动,你或许会同时开5个、10个对话,每个都在干活。但每次对话都是你亲手发起的...第三阶段你不再发起对话,你写了一个系统,让他自己去读你的仓库,读issue,读CI的失败,自己决定该用什么样的提示词驱动智能体工作。" — 小木头 (视频3)

I — Interpretation (自述)

个人与 AI 协作方式经历三个进化阶段:

  1. 逐行驾驶 (Prompting): 手写代码/内容,AI 给自动补全。人是操作者,AI 是工具。
  2. 并行手动 (Parallel): 同时开 5-10 个对话,每个都在干活。人是调度员,在多个窗口间切换。
  3. Loop 系统 (Loop Engineering): 不再发起对话,设计一个系统让 AI 自主工作。人是系统设计者。

每个阶段的特征:

  • Stage 1: 每次任务都是一次性的,AI 是"高级自动补全"
  • Stage 2: 效率提升但人是瓶颈,所有对话都需亲手发起
  • Stage 3: 系统自主运行,人只需要设计和监督

A1 — Past Application (书中案例)

案例1: Boris Cherny (视频2)

  • 描述了从"逐行驾驶"到"写 loop"的进化
  • 当前处于 Stage 3: 有一堆 loop 在跑,自己只写新的 loop

案例2: 小木头 (视频3)

  • 自评处于 Stage 2 (并行手动)
  • 正在向 Stage 3 过渡 (演示了选题 loop)

案例3: Adam Gillock (视频1)

  • 非技术背景,但已经用 loop 做视频剪辑
  • 说明 Stage 3 不限于技术人员

A2 — Future Trigger (未来触发)

  1. 自我评估时: "我现在 AI 用得怎么样?"
  2. 制定学习计划时: "下一步该学什么?"
  3. 团队能力建设时: 评估团队整体 AI 使用阶段
  4. 向他人解释 Loop Engineering 时: 用这个模型说明"为什么要升级到 Stage 3"

语言信号: "我现在在哪个阶段"、"AI 使用下一步"、"团队 AI 能力评估"、"从手动到自动"

与相邻 skill 的区别:

  • loop-build-path: 升级到 Stage 3 后的构建指南 (本 skill 是定位和决策)
  • loop-worthiness-test: Stage 3 中判断具体任务要不要做 loop (本 skill 是整体阶段评估)
  • comprehension-gap: Stage 3 的风险 (本 skill 是 Stage 3 的进阶路径)

E — Execution (可执行步骤)

Step 1: 自评当前阶段

回答以下问题:

  • 你每次用 AI 都是亲手发起对话吗? → Stage 1 或 2
  • 你有多个 AI 对话同时运行吗? → Stage 2
  • 你有定时/事件触发的 AI 任务吗? → 可能是 Stage 3
  • 你设计过"让 AI 自主决定做什么"的系统吗? → Stage 3

Step 2: 对照特征定位

  • 如果主要是"人发起→AI 执行→人反馈" → Stage 1
  • 如果主要是"人同时管理多个 AI 任务" → Stage 2
  • 如果主要是"系统自动运行,人设计系统" → Stage 3

Read the full file on GitHub · 110 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 110 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A d188682ead69

Subscribe to this mod's changes

three-stage-evolution is a skill published in the GitHub repository kangarooking/loop-engineering-skill (23 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 1,530 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens