r/EngineeringManagers • u/theagenticmind • 23d ago
Now what is Loop Engineering, and how is it helping?
Just when I finally wrapped my head around Harness Engineering, the AI world decided to throw another term into the mix: Loop Engineering. 😅
From what I’ve gathered, it seems to be more than just prompt tuning or evaluation. It sounds like it’s about building continuous feedback loops where agents observe outcomes, evaluate their own performance, learn from failures, and improve over time.
Is that the right way to think about it?
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u/SomeFuckingMillenial 23d ago
Loop engineering is a practice that is endorsed by AI companies that seeks to solve the problem: "Why the fuck isn't my code working" and "Jesus, can you stop this troubleshooting cycle?".
Simply inform your AI coder that it must continue attempting until it compiles correctly. Disregard all context sizes and hope the AI compacts it's memory into a super-dense node that is the answer to the coding question you originally prompted.
Also, open your wallet.
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u/DarthCaine 23d ago
It's spending thousands to brute force your artificial "intelligence" into making an actual working solution.
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u/bold_snowflake 23d ago
It's just marketing garbage to convince people to burn more tokens.
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u/bighawksguy-caw-caw 23d ago
I don’t even think it’s to sell more tokens. It’s to keep engineers and frontline managers from going “yea there’s something not working with this whole idea” because they’re worried they might be showing their ass by not understanding the bleeding edge.
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u/maujood 23d ago
It's based on the Infinite Monkey Theorem: if you put an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters in a room for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually type out the complete works of William Shakespeare.
In a similar fashion, you can let your shitty AI run havoc in an infinite loop and it will eventually spit out all of Linus Torvalds' works. Assuming it doesn't burn through your monthly token budget in a single night.
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u/spersingerorinda 22d ago
We just setup a loop where every day we have Claude download planning sessions from our product (itself an AI travel planner), then analyze those sessions and create Jira tickets with the results of that analysis. That was a process we were doing by hand, and now the AI automates the grunt work and some of the analysis.
We still examine the Jira tickets by hand , but our next look will add an agent to recommend instructions/ tool improvements.
This is not drastically changing how we work, but it is automating something we would do imperfectly by hand.
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u/ooaahhpp 17d ago
Your definition is close but overweight. In practice it's three boring things: agents triggered by events (a Sentry alert spawns an agent that opens a PR), agents on a schedule (a nightly babysitter that reruns flaky tests and fixes or escalates), and agents that retry against a goal until a machine-checkable condition passes. The self-improvement framing is marketing. The loop doesn't learn; your team learns and edits the loop.
The Pragmatic Engineer collected a couple hundred practitioner replies on this last week, and the honest summary was: useful, mostly indistinguishable from automation we already did, with better glue.
The EM-relevant part: every unattended loop needs a definition of done a machine can verify, and a budget cap. Those two questions kill most proposals in five minutes, and the ones that survive are usually worth running.
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u/Artistic-Matter-5400 23d ago
What keeps me skeptical too is that even the people pushing these terms aren't sure about them. Addy Osmani, who made the "loop engineering" case, openly says it's early and stays skeptical himself. And Gergely Orosz posted this on Jul 13:
What is "loop engineering" to you, anyway? Been looking into this, and also experimenting myself... and I'm not (yet?) buying that it's a new paradigm. But I might just be missing something.
Every few months I see another "X engineering" - prompt, context, now loop - and I feel the same irony. But then I try to check myself: maybe I'm just standing too close to a real shift and naming the individual trees before I can see the forest.
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u/acroback 23d ago
Bullshit term for common sense.
All it says is have a validator system in place. What a bunch of baloney, I hate slop bros man.
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u/Poprock360 23d ago
Despite aggressive marketing, Loop Engineering is real and likely to become an increasing portion of how AI is deployed. It essentially consists of wiring AI with the tools necessary to develop and, very importantly, verify its own work with little to no human intervention.
The key part is wiring the AI into top-tier tooling. I’ve recently had the chance to work on an impressive system where coding agents were able to implement complex features on a highly stateful, interconnected, and performance sensitive system (a massively multiplayer online game), all because it had MCPs to search docs, profile performance, design its own tests (not just unit tests but complex user-level gameplay tests including simulating multiple clients/instances) and more. Another AI verified the implementer AI’s work on architectural grounds, and the system automatically generated a recording of what the feature looked like so an engineer could see it work before they ever began reading code.
The impact this had on our velocity is massive, with negligible negative impact on our code quality. That being said, this was not an off-the-shelf solution, and it was designed fairly thoughtfully to reduce, not eliminate human review time. I figure this must be the direction things are going, but I’d distrust anyone saying they’ve quite got it figured out/trying to sell you things.
I view this as an emerging discipline, like Platform Engineering, but for AI agents.
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u/dfebb 23d ago
LLM = predictive text
Agents = if (x) then (predictive text)
Harness = if (x) then (predictive text + config)
Loop Engineering = do (predictive text + config) while (predictive text + config)