Loop Engineering

"Loop engineering is replacing yourself as the person who prompts the agent. You design the system that does it instead."

Everything started with a tweet from @steipete:

Then Addy Osmani wrote a full article about it.

The thesis is that a loop here can be thought of a recursive goal where you define a purpose, and the AI iterates until complete. It's roughly five building blocks:

• Automations that go off on a schedule and do discovery and triage by themselves.
• Worktrees so two agents working in parallel dont step on each other.
• Skills to write down the project knowledge the agent would otherwise just guess.
• Plugins and connectors to plug the agent into the tools you already use.
• Sub-agents so one of them has the idea and a different one checks it.

And Claude Code and Codex both have all five now.

Sources: Tweet, Article