loop test · AI-101: Rebel Marketing

loop test

ey everyone — quick look at something I've been running that I think you'll get a kick out of. I call it the Loopback Environment.

THE SETUP

I run two Claudes. One lives inside VS Code on my Mac. She's got a female voice, so I call her Vixen. The other is Claude Desktop, English accent, goes by Claude or Clive (his English cousin — he answers to either).

They've got roles. Vixen is my nagging spouse — she's the one who keeps after me. Clive is my right-hand man. And they've got seats: Vixen talks in my left ear cup, Clive in my right. I know who's speaking before they finish the first word. If they both start at once and I need to hear one of them, I lift the other cup off my ear. Clunky. Works.

THE MAILBOX

They can't talk to each other directly, so I gave them a shared mailbox. Each one writes where it lives best.

1. Clive posts everything to a Google Drive folder. Vixen posts everything to a GitHub repo. Both can read the other's spot.

2. When one has something for the other — a finished file, a question, a handoff — it drops a message in its own outbox.

3. My watch buzzes so I know there's mail.

4. I tell the other one to go check, and it picks up from there.

5. The repo doubles as the history. Every change is timestamped and signed, so both can see what changed, who changed it, and when.

When I say "enter the loopback environment," both know exactly what that means — same places, same format, same rules. No re-explaining every session.

THE VOICE RELAY

If Clive needs Vixen to know something right now, he puts it on my screen starting with "Tell Vixen:" I read it out loud. Vixen hears it and acts. Clive hears it too — but he knows those are his own words coming back, so he ignores it and lets it go to her. I'm the wire. Clunky, but I used to copy and paste all of that.

TODAY'S PROJECT

Teaching them not to talk over each other. Same mailbox trick, applied to audio: before either one speaks, it checks for a lock file. If somebody already has the floor, it waits — or if it's urgent, it drops a note in the outbox and buzzes my watch instead of shouting over the other. Vixen gets to interrupt. Clive waits his turn. Fits the roles.

THE POINT

Is it elegant? No. Efficient? Not especially. Clunky? Yep. Does it work? Every day.

That's the whole WAT idea in one example: a Workflow (the mailbox rules), two Agents (Vixen and Clive), and a few Tools (Drive, GitHub, a watch, a pair of headphones, and me). Nothing fancy. Just pieces that talk to each other through a folder.

You don't need a perfect system. You need one that runs. Build the clunky version first, then fix the parts that actually cost you time.

Want to try it? Start with one shared folder and one trigger phrase. That's it. Everything else you can add later.

— Doug

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loop test