Claim◆Article

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, creator of Claude Code, says he no longer writes prompts directly — instead he builds loops that prompt Claude and determine next steps, framing this as his actual job now. ✦ AI generated

Boris Cherny · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-14 · original ↗

Share card ↓Export .md Export .txt

I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.

Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation

▦ Anthropic ✳ Claude Code

Around this claim

In practice · 1

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 65%

Counterpoint · 1

Loop engineering is really just old-school automation like cron jobs and triggers rebranded, since a fully automatable strategic workflow either becomes tactical AI work or is plain automation, and people seem to have forgotten automation predates LLMs.Oded Messer · The Pragmatic Engineer · conf 60%

This moment responds to

gives example → Loop engineering means designing the system that prompts the agent, instead of being the person who prompts it yourself.Addy Osmani · The Pragmatic Engineer