🔄 Wiring the Loop, For Real
End of day, and I’ve been deep in the agent runner loop. The loop loops. The patcher patches. The context layer...fluxes (at least in the demo). But nothing’s fully wired yet because now I’ve hit the planning layer.
That’s the part that bridges the gap between intention and execution. It decides what tools the LLM can use, how the prompt is structured, and what the output should look like. Without it, the loop can’t reason – it’s just a dumb repeater. So I’ve been grinding through yet another node in the stack, knowing that once this layer is in, I can finally plug everything into the loop and get a working system.
What’s become clearer as I go is how these nodes (patching, context, planning) aren’t just isolated functions. They're additive in really meaningful way. They build on each other to form a capability. That’s shifted how I’m thinking about the name too. I’m dropping Atomic. This isn’t about isolated units. It’s about accumulation. Layers that build momentum. So VULCAN now stands for:
Vibe Utility for Layered Construction of Accretive Nodes.
And I’m starting to see the first real block coming into view. Once the planning layer is done, I’ll be able to wire all the MCPs into the agent runner (the next node), and that’ll complete the first true block: a full loop that takes a plan and turns it into working code.
Everything after this — audits, tests, hardening — is just an enhancement to the core functionality. But this one? This is the engine. The system lives or dies by whether this part works.
Maybe the biggest shift today is that I’m finally starting to understand how it all fits. Not abstractly, but concretely. Like: how the planner feeds the loop. How the loop activates an MCP. How a tool returns a patch. How that patch becomes a diff, and how that diff hits the file system and saves changes. It’s not magic anymore. It’s starting to feel like a system I actually know my way around.
That doesn’t mean it’s working yet. But it means I’m not lost. And at this stage, that feels like real progress.