Loops

A loop is recurring, goal-directed work that observes the business, acts through governed tools, checks what happened, and repeats. Loops are how Continual runs and improves operations instead of merely firing one-off automations.

Operation and loop

An operation is the real-world business activity or outcome: customer onboarding, fulfillment, collections, or incident response. A loop is the control mechanism that keeps that operation moving toward its goal. One operation may use several loops, and a loop may coordinate people, apps, agents, and external systems.

The loop

A loop defines:

• the outcome it is pursuing;
• the state, events, and metrics it may observe;
• the tools and permissions it may use;
• the targets, guardrails, and escalation rules that constrain it;
• how it checks the result and decides what should happen next.

A loop can wake on a schedule, when a relevant event arrives, or when a person or another loop starts it. The definition is not limited to one fixed trigger or subscription.

Triggers are not truth

Events and schedules are wake-up signals. The loop reconciles against current objects and external systems before acting, so dropped, duplicated, or delayed events do not become the business state. This is the same reliability principle used by controllers and reconcilers.

Improvement stays governed

Run history, metric observations, exceptions, and human corrections become evidence. Agents can use that evidence to propose changes to the loop or the wider Company Runtime, but production behavior changes only through a reviewed, tested, and reversible change.