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loop engineering
also designing loops or loop-based development
Definition of loop engineering
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: The practice of building an automated system that prompts and drives AI agents, instead of prompting them by hand: the system finds work, hands it out, checks the result, records progress, and decides the next step until a goal is met.
- Instead of pasting the same prompt into the coding agent every few hours, she built a loop that runs the tests, reads the failure, and sends the agent back automatically.
- Loop engineering moves the developer from writing prompts to designing the loop that prompts the agents.
Origin & history
The name took hold in June 2026 after developer Peter Steinberger posted that engineers should stop prompting coding agents and instead design loops that prompt them; the post drew millions of views. Anthropic's Claude Code lead Boris Cherny made the same point around the same time, and Google Cloud director Addy Osmani popularized the name "loop engineering."
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Cite this entry
"Loop engineering." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/loop-engineering/. Accessed 30 Oct. 2026.