Lab 11 — Loop engineering

Use this lab’s provider.env.example and the preflight. Create a synthetic service.txt with a name and port. In interactive Copilot ask for JSON with services entries containing name, port and evidence (service.txt:line). Check the output and each citation against the file outside the model. If invalid, send specific errors, not just “try again”; stop on success, repeated identical errors, or three attempts. Record the exit reason.

Diagram how retry (transient failure), polling (finite deadline), refinement (plateau) and validation (schema/citation) each need a trigger, evaluator, state delta and bounded exits. Do not run side-effecting retries or unlimited polling. Copilot’s agent loop does not itself prove an externally enforced on_stop validation contract; this is a manual feedback loop unless separately implemented.