Production Patterns

🚀 Production Loop Patterns

Loop engineering provides seven battle-tested patterns designed for real-world development workflows. Each pattern provides defined scheduling, risk profiles, verification gates, and human hand-off protocols.

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1. Pattern Registry Overview

Pattern	Recommended Cadence	Risk Level	Primary Objective
Daily Triage	2h – 24h	Low	Scans open PRs, stale issues, and updates STATE.md with team priorities.
CI Sweeper	5m – 15m	Medium	Detects failing CI runs, isolates root cause, generates minimal reproducible fix.
PR Babysitter	5m – 15m	Medium	Keeps PRs rebased against main, resolves merge conflicts, ensures CI checks pass.
Dependency Sweeper	6h – 24h	Medium	Audits npm/pip advisories, bumps patch versions, verifies lockfiles against tests.
Issue Triage	2h – 24h	Low	Categorizes issues, detects duplicates, requests missing reproduction steps.
Changelog Drafter	24h	Low	Parses merged PRs and commit logs to draft release notes grouped by feature.
Post-Merge Cleanup	6h – 24h	Low	Deletes merged remote branches, closes resolved tickets, updates documentation.

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2. In-Depth Pattern Specifications

1. Daily Triage (daily-triage)

• Problem Solved: Standup overhead and uncoordinated agent work.
• Mechanism: Queries GitHub/Linear for assigned items, inspects blockers, reconciles STATE.md, and prepares the task queue for downstream specialist agents.
• Safety Gate: Read-only analysis. Never modifies production code or closes tickets without explicit label rules.

2. CI Sweeper (ci-sweeper)

• Problem Solved: Flaky tests, broken trunk builds, and slow developer feedback loops.
• Mechanism: Triggered on CI failure webhook or polled schedule. Clones the failing commit into an isolated worktree, reproduces the failure locally, applies a minimal fix, and verifies via local test suite.
• Verification: The fix must pass 100% of existing tests plus add a targeted regression test.

3. PR Babysitter (pr-babysitter)

• Problem Solved: PR bit-rot, merge conflicts, and stale review comments.
• Mechanism: Monitors active PRs. When main advances, fetches the PR branch into a worktree, rebases cleanly, resolves trivial conflicts, runs verification, and force-pushes with lease.
• Human Gate: If non-trivial semantic conflicts occur, tags the author and exits without destructive action.

4. Dependency Sweeper (dependency-sweeper)

• Problem Solved: Security vulnerabilities (Dependabot spam) and stale package versions.
• Mechanism: Runs npm audit / cargo audit / pip audit. Identifies non-breaking semver patches. Updates dependencies one at a time and runs the full test suite.
• Safety Rule: Major version bumps and lockfile anomalies are strictly escalated to human engineers.

5. Issue Triage (issue-triage)

• Problem Solved: Unstructured bug reports and feature requests cluttering the backlog.
• Mechanism: Reads incoming issues. Checks against an issue template schema. Prompts the author for missing reproduction steps, logs environment details, and assigns component labels.

6. Changelog Drafter (changelog-drafter)

• Problem Solved: Late, inaccurate, or missing release notes.
• Mechanism: Analyzes the delta between the latest git tag and HEAD. Extracts PR titles and conventional commit prefixes (feat:, fix:, perf:). Drafts release markdown in docs/releases/.

7. Post-Merge Cleanup (post-merge-cleanup)

• Problem Solved: Branch sprawl and lingering tracking issues.
• Mechanism: Scans remote branches whose commits have been merged into main. Deletes the remote branch if delete-on-merge was not triggered, and marks corresponding tickets as resolved.

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3. Deployment Lifecycle: The Two-Phase Rule

WEEK 1: L1 REPORT-ONLY MODE
  ├── Loop executes triggers and runs checks
  ├── Generates reports and diffs to STATE.md
  └── Prohibits direct pushes and PR merges

WEEK 2+: GRADUATED ACTUATION
  ├── Only after 7 days of 100% report accuracy
  ├── Enable automated branch creation and PR opening
  └── Maintain human gate on auto-merge