geometry of a loop : recursive dev

Many engineers, including senior ones, mentally model the 'recursive loop' in agentic software development as a flat circles: planning, coding, testing, and verification/eval as a final step.
a CNC milling pass, which is about tolerance convergence rather than endless circular repetition is a better mental model.
In CNC milling, start with a rough large pass, then refine with progressively finer passes—analogous to starting with a rough idea and converging toward final intent.
The actual pattern of recursive dev is more tree-like than circular: branch, quickly test certain paths, eliminate weak branches, and traverse to others.
Pruning in agentic coding can happen in parallel, out of sequence, nonlinearly, or probabilistically—driven by testing, linting, type checking, and state compression.
The recursive/branching process should be guardrail bounded and evaluation criteria. The boundary recursion constrained within a defined problem space.