Iterate

Iterate — refine to Done, don't stop at the first attempt

Trigger phrases: "iterate", "loop until done", "keep going until"

When

A task has an objective acceptance criterion (tests, a review gate, a spec) and the first attempt may not meet it. This is a single-session refinement loop — NOT the harness /loop, which schedules a prompt on an interval. Open-ended exploration with no checkable target does not belong here.

The loop

1. Name the exit test first — the concrete, checkable condition that means "done": tests green,

crew-review-agent clean, the spec's acceptance criterion met, zero SonarQube findings. No exit test → go to spec-planning first; a loop without a target never terminates. Prefer an external, machine-grounded verifier — a test exit code, a schema match, a lint/quality gate — over an LLM's self-assessment. A model grading its own output inflates; an "it looks done" or even a single "review clean" with no objective check is a weak verifier. When the only available check is a judgment call, ground it (a second agent with a distinct lens, an explicit rubric) rather than trusting the loop's own say-so. For a generative task with no exit code, the eval-grader skill is that external verifier — a two-layer scorecard (code metrics + LLM-judge) over a fixed set, read as signed deltas vs a pinned baseline.

1. Run one round: change → verify (drive the real flow, not only tests) → check the exit test.
2. Report the gap every round — state what still fails and why. Never loop silently.
3. Repeat until the exit test passes. Stop early and surface it if: two rounds pass with no new

progress (you are stuck — report, don't spin), the exit test itself is wrong, or a blocker needs a decision from the user.

1. Close at the DoD gate, not at a commit. crew-commit-agent still proposes and waits for §4.4

approval. The loop never commits, pushes, or deploys on its own.

Guardrails

• Bounded, not infinite. A fixed exit test plus a no-progress stop is the whole point; "keep trying

forever" is a bug, not diligence.

• Token discipline ([[token-budget]]): each round re-pays for context. Keep a round's output a summary,

push heavy logs to docs/*.md, and don't fan out a subagent per round unless isolation demands it.

• Don't move the goalposts. Never weaken the exit test to end the loop — fix the work, or stop and ask.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: crewforth
• Source: crewforth/crewforth
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://crewforth.com/

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.