New trend of AI coding: loops

Since a week or two the term 'loop engineering' is coming up after 'prompt engineering' and 'agentic workflow' seem to not cut it anymore and we need more abstractions. The first time I tried to write something which would do something useful with a LLM was about two years ago in December 2024, I wanted to do translation of big documents from Korean to English on my local RTX 3060 with 12 GB VRAM. I couldn't just use the ChatGPT chat for that because back then it's context window was way too small for the massive documents I needed translated and it would stop translating after 10%. So I thought I can automate the splitting up of the document. But because I did not know anything about agents I had to come up with some architecture. So I made this very complicated agent pipeline: Agent pipeline / loops The pipeline turns a raw Korean transcript into an English translation through a plan → execute → critique → repair loop. A literal NLLB translation acts as an impartial reference, and a…