Distill Coding Agent Learnings

Repo: https://github.com/voku/agent-loop Demo: https://voku.github.io/agent_loop_demo/ Your Coding Agent Doesn’t Need More Memory. It Needs a Governed Loop. Coding agents repeat mistakes. The obvious response is to give them more memory: MEMORY.md project-rules.md agent-notes.md lessons-learned.md MEMORY_FINAL.md Soon the agent receives old decisions, temporary workarounds, copied transcripts, abandoned ideas, and rules nobody remembers approving. It has more context. It does not necessarily have better context. At some point, memory becomes landfill. The problem is not that coding agents forget too much. The problem is that most workflows fail to distinguish between temporary context, evidence, proposed learning, and approved project guidance. A transcript is not memory. A note is not a rule. A finding is not guidance. And a successful patch is not automatically a project convention. Instead of giving the agent one growing pile of context, I built voku/agent-loop around a governed workflow: task -> approved plan -> selective recall -> implementation -> verification -> recorded evidence -> reviewed learning Start with approved scope A coding agent should not begin by reading a ticket and creatively filling in everything the ticket forgot to mention. It should begin with an explicit work brief: goal; permitted scope; non-goals; affected files; required validation; human approval. For example: vendor/bin/agent-loop workflow plan PROJECT-123 \ --by lars \ --learning-root infra/doc/agent-learning \ --file src/Order/OrderService.php \ --file tests/Order/OrderServiceTest.php \ --goal "Reject invalid order state transitions" \ --scope "Order state validation and its tests" \ --non-goal "Do not redesign the order aggregate" \ --validate "composer phpstan" \ --validate "composer test" A human then approves that specific revision: vendor/bin/agent-loop workflow approve PROJECT-123 --by lars When the plan changes, the old revision becomes superseded , and the new one requires