Appendix A: The Loop Templates
One template per loop you run; one log line per run. Companion to Chapter 5.
The stack is not the point. The role separation is. A loop is defined by whether the producing role and the judging role are held apart, so no output gets approved by the thing that made it. Two rules hold across all three: the producer never approves its own work, and the human owns the spine and the ship decision.
Loop 1: Discovery
| Role | Held by |
|---|---|
| Spine | You: the problem as you understand it, the framing you bring, the assumption you most want stress-tested |
| Producer | A council of deliberately conflicting perspectives, made to disagree before they converge |
| Judge | The friction itself; each perspective names the flaw it sees in the others |
| Adjudicator | You: what the reframe means |
Inputs: the problem statement, the conflicting personas, the one assumption to break. The rule that must not break: the perspectives stay irreconcilable and persistent; you own the synthesis.
Loop 2: Spec
| Role | Held by |
|---|---|
| Spine | You: the decision, the boundary, what counts as wrong |
| Producer | One model drafts the spec from your spine |
| Judge | A different model as hostile reader, told to find the ambiguity an engineer could exploit |
| Adjudicator | You: read the gap between what you meant and what the judge could misread, then tighten |
Inputs: the one-line request, the spine, the adversary’s brief. The rule that must not break: producer and adversary are different parties; you own the tightening.
Loop 3: Analysis
| Role | Held by |
|---|---|
| Spine | You: your own read of the data, three sentences, committed before the model touches it |
| Producer | One model produces an independent read |
| Judge | A second model adjudicates the two reads against the raw numbers only |
| Adjudicator | You: the final interpretation |
Inputs: the dashboard or cohort or calls, your committed read, the raw evidence. The rule that must not break: commit your read first; the referee touches only the evidence; you own the final call.
The run log
One line per run. The cognitive work of running the loop is the education; this line is the transcript.
| Date | Loop type | What it taught (where my framing, my spec, or my read was stale, or still outran the machine) |
|---|---|---|