loobster

Loobster

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          AI that plans, builds, verifies & secures every change — solo or team

plan → build → verify → secure · goal-loops · shared signals · configurable compliance · independent verification · local-first

🦞 Loobster — loop + lobster. Run bin/loobster.sh for the animated red version of the mascot.

📖 Docs: nilswidal.github.io/loobster — a team-focused docs site (source in docs/, served via GitHub Pages; see docs/DEPLOY.md).

Loobster is a Claude Code plugin that turns AI-assisted development into a repeatable, reviewable, secure loop. It right-sizes each task, plans before it builds, can run autonomously between approval gates, and proves its work with an independent verifier instead of trusting itself. It coordinates whole teams through a shared signals hub, and runs the compliance frameworks you choose against every diff.

Under the hood it follows the RePPITS method — Research, Propose, Plan, Implement, Test, Secure — created by Mihail Eric (the RePPIT framework, from the creator of Stanford's first AI software engineering course). Healthcare (HIPAA/HITRUST) is one aspect, alongside ISO 27001 and SOC 2 — enable only what your repo needs.

Why loop engineering

AI-assisted development is shifting from one-shot prompts to durable, autonomous loops — the loop, not the prompt, is becoming the unit of work. An agent that plans, builds, tests, and retries against a goal does far more than one that answers once. The catch: an unsupervised loop is only as trustworthy as its guardrails. Left alone, a loop will happily rubber-stamp its own output, drift from scope, or burn the context window.

Loobster is the harness that makes a loop safe to let run:

• Risk-tiered gates — friction scales with blast radius; sensitive changes never auto-advance.
• Bounded convergence — the Implement→Test→Secure fix loop caps at 3 iterations, then escalates to a human (no infinite loops, no silent commits past failures).
• Never self-verify — every check runs in a separate verifier agent, so a loop can't grade its own work.
• Signals — independent loops (and people) coordinate through a shared, mergeable channel.
• Compliance + token discipline — gates run against the diff; context stays lean enough that long loops stay affordable.

It stands on two foundations: RePPIT (Mihail Eric) gives the phase structure a loop iterates over, and headroom (Tejas Chopra) gives the token economics that make long loops viable. Loobster wires both into the agent's control loop.

At a glance

Capability	What it does
Structured workflow	Research → Propose → Plan → Implement → Test → Secure (the RePPITS method), with explicit approval gates
Adaptive gating	Phase-0 right-sizing (trivial / standard / sensitive) chooses which gates apply; sensitive never auto-advances
Autonomous mode	At Gate 3, "run autonomously" drives Implement → Test → Secure on its own (bounded loop, cap 3, escalate; final commit/push always stops)
Goal-loop	/loop works a prioritized RICE-scored backlog toward a standing goal, cycle after cycle — crash-safe (reclaims interrupted tasks) and runs to a real exit condition, never pausing at a milestone
Signals hub	/signals — a shared team hub: any loop/teammate emits observations, any loop consumes them, with a dynamic dashboard
Configurable compliance	Enable any of HIPAA · HITRUST · ISO 27001 · SOC 2 per repo — healthcare is a profile, not a requirement
Token discipline	Subagent isolation + artifact compaction always on; optional headroom compression

What you get