Loop Engineering
Loop Engineering proposes a shift from hand-prompting coding agents to designing autonomous loops: a system with five components (scheduled automations for discovery, worktrees for parallel isolation, skills to codify project context, plugins/connectors via MCP, and verifier sub-agents) that lets agents iterate without manual intervention. The post maps these primitives across Codex and Claude Code, noting that memory persisted outside the conversation (via AGENTS.md or Linear) is the critical sixth piece. The core insight is that loop design is harder than prompt engineering—the engineer's role moves from operator to system architect, while verification burden, comprehension debt, and cognitive surrender remain unresolved challenges that the loop itself cannot eliminate.