loop

The loop is abcd's shape: a brief states what the project is, an intent states one user-facing change, plan mints a spec, the work ships, and the verdict is written back. Shipping closes the loop twice — the intent auditor grades each acceptance bullet against the repository and writes the verdict onto the intent, and the same change rewrites the brief passage to describe what actually shipped. The second half is what keeps the brief a true description rather than a wish list. The user-facing account is docs/explanation/process.md.

The loop has a last step and nothing runs it automatically: abcd intent plan moves a draft to planned/, and only the spec store's close moves a planned intent to shipped/ (commands/intent.md).

Senses

abcd never owns the run loop. It defines the contract — iterate over ready work, gate on a receipt, guard for safety — and a pluggable adapter supplies the loop itself. That is the whole reason the second sense needs its own name.

Where the record disagrees. The record has no settled noun. It writes "closes the loop twice", "Phase 6 closes abcd's loop with the lifeboat round-trip", and "the loop has a last step" — three different loops, one bare article, no definition outside the page that coins each (iss-2609012245352480). This entry is draft because it fixes a spelling the prose has not yet adopted: "closed loop" is recorded here as an alias, not as the form to write.

When to use

Use "the loop" for the record loop, and only where no run loop or round-trip is in view. Name the other two in full every time.

When NOT to use

Do not use "the loop" for a stretch of the sequence: the loop is the cycle each change runs through, and the sequence is dependencies plus the lifecycle shelves (record families); the phase that once named a stretch is retired. Do not use it for the agent loop of the wider literature; the terminology crosswalk records abcd's position on that term separately.

Examples

• "Shipping closes the loop twice: the verdict lands on the intent and the brief passage is rewritten."
• "The run loop gates each iteration on a receipt, whichever adapter provides it."
• "The lifeboat round-trip, disembark on a corpus repo and embark into an empty target, is the end-to-end check of both halves."

Related terms

• record families — the one page that maps the record families and how they relate
• intent, spec, brief — the record loop's three record kinds
• phase: the retired sequencing unit (adr-2609212115255771), never a stage of the loop
• disembark, lifeboat — the round-trip's two halves