agent-build-loop
Bash scripts that keep a coding-agent CLI working with nobody watching: a single-instance wrapper, a cron watchdog, a health check and an orphan reaper, each tied to a written-up failure.
- Year
- 2026
- Kind
- Agents & RAG · Shell
- Status
- Shipped
A coding agent left alone fails quietly. It stops early because a sentence mentioned the done-marker. It gets started twice. It retries a rate limit dozens of times in an hour. This repo is the set of guards against those cases: a flock-locked wrapper, a cron watchdog, an advisory health check, and a reaper that kills only stray test processes.
docs/FAILURE-MODES.md records six real incidents, each with symptom, cause, fix and lesson. In one, the rate-limit message changed wording, the detector missed it, and about 125 calls went out in 45 minutes. The first fix matched every limit-like word and then put a healthy worker to sleep for writing about rate limiting. A test now checks both directions.
The limits are stated plainly. Nothing here sandboxes the agent: it runs as the invoking user with full file and network access, and the write boundary is an instruction in the prompt. The rate-limit parsing reads the CLI's own text, which can change. It runs on one machine under cron, on Linux or macOS.
