# Loop Engineering for Coding Agents

DevFeed: [Loop Engineering for Coding Agents](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/stop-prompting-design-the-loop-19028.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.pulumi.com/blog/stop-prompting-design-the-loop/>)

Author: Engin Diri

Published: 2026-06-09T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Pulumi](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/pulumi.md>)

Topics: [Loop Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/loop-engineering.md>), [Claude Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/claude-code.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tooling.md>)

Tags: [agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agent.md>), [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agents.md>), [automation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automation.md>), [claude](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/claude.md>), [claude-code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/claude-code.md>), [perspectives](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/perspectives.md>), [platform-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/platform-engineering.md>), [prompting](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/prompting.md>), [pulumi-neo](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pulumi-neo.md>), [tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tooling.md>)

## AI overview

An opinion article argues that work with coding agents is shifting from manually writing successive prompts to designing automated loops that identify work, prompt agents, evaluate results, and select next steps.

## Source excerpt

For about two years, the unit of work with a coding agent was the prompt. You wrote a good one, you gave it enough context, you read what came back, and you wrote the next one. The agent was a tool, and you were holding it the entire time, one turn after another. That part is ending. Addy Osmani, a director of AI at Google Cloud, has a name for what replaces it, and I have not stopped thinking about it since: loop engineering. You stop being the person who prompts the agent. You design the loop that prompts it for you. In my phrasing: you stop being the thing that runs, and start designing the thing that runs. The leverage moves up a layer. What I want to do here is take an honest look at the pieces, and at the part nobody automates. The leverage moved up a layer The people building these tools have already made the jump. Peter Steinberger has been posting it as a monthly reminder. Peter Steinberger (@steipete) on X. Boris Cherny, who heads Claude Code at Anthropic, says the same thing about his own job. He does not prompt Claude anymore. He has loops running that prompt Claude and decide what to do next, scanning the issue tracker, the team chat, and the timeline for what to build. "My job is to write loops." A loop is a goal that prompts itself. You set the purpose, and the system keeps iterating until it's met. In practice it finds the work, hands it out, checks the result, writes down what got finished, and decides the next thing, then it pokes the agent instead of you. You build that small system once and let it run. Look closer, and a loop is really two loops nested. The inner one does the work against a spec. The outer one decides what the work should be: it watches an issue tracker, an error feed, a changelog, then writes the next spec and hands it down. Most people are still running that outer loop by hand, in their head, and calling it a backlog. The part that surprised me is that this is barely a tooling problem anymore. A year ago a loop meant a pile of