Agent Ops / Industry term
Self-paced loop
A self-paced loop lets an agent check a condition, decide whether the work is finished, and either stop or wait a moment before checking again, so the interval adapts to jobs whose length you cannot predict in advance.
A self-paced loop lets an agent check a condition, decide whether the work is finished, and either stop or wait a moment before checking again, so the interval adapts to jobs whose length you cannot predict in advance. Instead of running on a fixed clock, the agent repeats a small cycle of look, judge, and pause until the goal is met. Picture an agent watching a build that sometimes takes two minutes and sometimes takes twenty. It asks the build service for status, sees that the work is still running, waits a short stretch, and asks again; once the status reads finished, the loop ends and the agent moves on. The pacing comes from the work itself, not from a calendar entry you set ahead of time.
Builder example
When you tell an agent to watch a deploy, a long export, or a queued report, the finish time is rarely known up front. Set the agent to recheck on a self-paced loop and it asks for status, pauses, and asks again until the result is ready, then reports the outcome, so you do not have to guess a wait time or babysit the run. Without it, the agent either declares success too early on work that is still going or wastes calls hammering a service that has nothing new to report.
Common confusion: A cron schedule fires at a fixed clock time whether or not anything changed. A self-paced loop reacts to the state of one job and decides its own next check based on what it sees, which suits work whose length varies from run to run.