DefinitionArticle
Loop engineering means designing the system that prompts the agent, instead of being the person who prompts it yourself.
Addy Osmani defines loop engineering as a shift from personally prompting an agent to designing a system that does the prompting on your behalf. ✦ AI generated
Addy Osmani · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-14 · original ↗
Loop engineering is replacing yourself as the person who prompts the agent. You design the system that does it instead.
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In practice · 3
Cosine's 'swarm' feature — a hierarchical orchestration of up to 253 sub-agents, with an orchestrator delegating to subplanners who delegate to workers — let a model with no horology knowledge build a complete, physically-accurate mechanical-watch design SDK with a 3D viewer in one shot, something no single frontier model could do out of the box.Alistair Pullen · Machine Learning Street Talk · conf 75%Ralph is deliberately a simple, deterministic Bash loop that re-prompts the agent repeatedly, and despite its defects it can replace most outsourced greenfield engineering work while still requiring senior engineers to guide it.Geoffrey Huntley · The Pragmatic Engineer · conf 70%My job is no longer to write prompts for Claude — it's to write loops that prompt Claude and figure out what to do.Boris Cherny · The Pragmatic Engineer · conf 60%