> ... applying the same steps and rules n times

I do this too, with a document written for this purpose.

> ... a significant chunk of those runs involved the agent waiting for the compiler, linters, type checks, and test suites, as well as updating journals.

That is a good point. I'm mostly using C, which seemingly compiles in O(1) time, so I could imagine a large C++ or Rust codebase taking much longer to iterate simply due to compilation times.