How the loop works

This diagram shows the autoresearch lane. A goal goes in, and an agent proposes a change. The engine applies the change to a reversible world. A frozen judge measures it one time. The loop keeps the change only if it is strictly better than the best result so far. Git stores the accepted states, and the operator can steer the run. Privileged operations run on the host in a broker. The agent can only send requests to the broker.

flowchart TD
    issue["GitHub issue / Jira ticket"] -->|scope --issue| goal["Run goal<br/>(frozen objective)"]
    goal --> wide["wide round (optional)<br/>N parallel propose → rank → winner seeds"]
    wide --> propose

    subgraph control["Control plane (operator, human-in-the-loop)"]
        direction LR
        budget["budget"]
        steer["steer"]
        stoppark["stop / park"]
        resume["resume"]
        escalate["escalate"]
    end

    subgraph loop["The keep / discard loop"]
        direction TB
        propose["propose<br/>agent backend: local · openshell · command"]
        apply["apply<br/>World: edit tree, or build + set image"]
        measure["measure<br/>Judge: frozen, scores once"]
        accept{"accept?<br/>strictly better?"}
        remember["remember<br/>git commit + session NDJSON"]
        restore["restore<br/>World rollback to last good"]

        propose --> apply --> measure --> accept
        accept -->|keep| remember
        accept -->|discard| restore
        remember -->|next iteration| propose
        restore --> propose
    end

    control -. "steer / stop / resume / budget" .-> loop

    subgraph broker["MCP broker: the host keeps the credentials, the agent sends requests"]
        direction TB
        prov["provisioning<br/>GPU / Kueue, capture RBAC"]
        jira["issue-tracker grounding"]
        prof["profiler<br/>pprof / GPU traces"]
        forge["forge build + deploy<br/>buildah / native-OCI derive-layer, digest-pinned"]
        draft["draft PR per fork"]
    end

    propose -. "MCP ask" .-> broker
    forge -. "image + set image" .-> apply

    remember -->|publish-on-keep| s3[("S3 run records<br/>session.jsonl · summary.json · diffs")]
    remember --> draft
    draft -->|review comments re-steer| steer
    remember -->|evidence upload, pod token| ctl["control plane<br/>(crucible-controller)"]

Loop control states is a generated diagram of the controls around the loop: the gates between iterations and the ways a run ends.

The stages

Glossary

Some words have a specific meaning in the loop. World and Judge are the most important, because they define the trust boundary.

The loop in one read describes the same model in text.