Agentic Loops (Inner / Outer / Meta)

#concept

Summary

The next paradigm after the harness (Konstantin's forecast: dominant in 2027): wrap the agent in progressively larger loops. Three levels — inner (ReAct), outer/Ralph (infinite while true), and meta (periodic wipe-and-restart).

Current Understanding

Inner loop = the classic ReAct cycle inside the harness: task → call tools → reflect → … → solved → text answer.
Outer / Ralph loop (attributed to Geoffrey Huntley): while true; do claude --dangerously-skip-permissions -p "solve" || true; done. Lets an agent work for days/weeks and — crucially — stay in the "smart zone" (roughly the first third of context, where the model is sharpest) by avoiding the context growth → summarization → decay spiral. Guardrails against "slop": CI/CD as back-pressure and code-quality validation. See context-as-scarce-resource.
Meta loop (Konstantin's own, not standard): periodically stop, wipe all agent-created data into an archive the agent can't initially see, and restart from scratch — so it explores a different path. Counters collapse (Karpathy): asked repeatedly, a model reworks the same solution with different words (the "tells the same joke with new characters" example). Good for open-ended research tasks.

This is the domain of the emerging loop-engineer role (after prompt → context → harness engineer).

Evidence

Three-level loop model, Ralph loop code, smart-zone argument, meta-loop, collapse, back-pressure — 2026-07-14-skills-based-on-git.
Auto-agent example: weak GigaChat 1/89 → 11/89 over a weekend inside a self-improvement loop (idea from Karpathy's "autoagent").
Orchestration-era models that self-verify are the model-side complement — 2026-07-14-everything-we-knew-about-software-has-changed.

Concepts: harness, context-as-scarce-resource, skills-as-memory, evolution-of-agent-tooling
Entity: konstantin
Tools: claude-code, hermes

Contradictions / Uncertainty

The "smart zone = first third of context" is a rule of thumb, not a measured constant. Status: tentative.
Meta loop is the author's own construct, "not generally accepted."

Next Questions

What CI signals make the best back-pressure without over-constraining exploration?

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