Greploop

Greploop

Run a Greptile review on the local branch, fix what it finds, review again. Stop at 5/5 with zero comments.

This is the local CLI loop. No PR, nothing pushed. Command and output details are in the greptile-cli skill.

You are the loop

Run the steps below yourself, once per iteration. Do not reach for watch(1):

• It never exits, so it hangs the session. BusyBox watch has no exit condition, and GNU's --chgexit only stops when output changes, not when the score reaches 5/5.
• Nothing edits the code between ticks, so it re-reviews the same commit and returns the same findings forever, billing a real review each time without ever converging.
• It is not installed on macOS.

The fix between reviews is the entire point, and only you can make it.

If the user explicitly wants a hands-off shell loop with no agent in it, this is the shape. It still cannot fix anything, so it only reports:

for i in $(seq 1 5); do
  greptile review --json > review.json || break
  [ "$(jq '.confidence == 5 and (.comments | length) == 0' < review.json)" = "true" ] && break
  echo "iteration $i: $(jq -r '.confidence')/5, $(jq '.comments | length' < review.json) comments"
done

Loop

Copy this checklist and check items off as you go:

Greploop progress:
- [ ] Step 0: Preflight
- [ ] Step 1: Start from a clean worktree
- [ ] Step 2: Review
- [ ] Step 3: Check exit conditions
- [ ] Step 4: Fix findings
- [ ] Step 5: Commit, then back to Step 2
- [ ] Step 6: Report

Step 0: Preflight

git rev-parse --show-toplevel   # must be a git repo with a remote
command -v greptile             # must be installed
greptile whoami                 # check the OUTPUT, not the exit code

If greptile is missing, stop and tell the user to install it (npm install -g greptile, or brew install greptileai/tap/greptile).

greptile whoami exits 0 even when signed out, printing Not signed in. … to stdout, so gate on its text:

greptile whoami | grep -q '^Not signed in' && echo "needs login"

If it needs a login, stop and tell the user to run greptile login. It is an interactive browser flow; do not attempt it yourself.

Step 1: Start from a clean worktree

greptile review reviews committed changes against the branch base, and this loop commits once per iteration, so it needs a clean tree to begin with.

git status --porcelain     # must be empty before you start

If anything is listed, stop and hand it back to the user. Ask them to commit or stash it, and say why: once the loop starts, any file it edits gets staged whole, so a change they had in that file would be swept into a commit labelled as review feedback. You cannot separate their edits from yours inside a single file, and an agent should not be splitting hunks to try.

Do not commit or stash on their behalf, and do not proceed with a dirty tree because the dirty files look unrelated. The loop only learns which files it will touch after the first review.

Step 2: Review

greptile review --json > review.json

Always --json, and capture it. The next steps read review.json. A review takes on the order of a minute; do not wrap it in a short timeout, and do not start a second one while one is running.

Pass -b <branch> when the user named a base. Otherwise omit it and let the CLI resolve the repository default.

A zero exit with findings is the normal case. greptile review exits 0 whatever it finds. A non-zero exit means the review did not complete: report the stderr message and stop. Several of those are about the input and will never clear by looping: detached HEAD, more than 500 changed files, a diff over 3 MB, a base sharing no history with HEAD, or every changed file held back as sensitive.

Step 3: Check exit conditions

jq '{confidence, count: (.comments | length)}' < review.json

Stop the loop when any of these is true:

• confidence is 5 and comments is empty. Success, go to Step 6.
• Iteration count reaches 5. Stop and report what remains.
• Two consecutive iterations produce the same findings with no successful fix. You are stuck.

confidence: 5 with comments still open means keep going: the comments are the work.