Responsible Loop Engineering

Loop engineering convinced me. Not because it’s clever — because done right, it doesn’t bankrupt you. This post captures where I’ve landed: a responsible way to run loops at scale without burning a hole in your pocket. Naysayer → Believer ## I’ve been a vocal naysayer. Not because the approach doesn’t work — it works. The costs never justified it. No surprise — the people singing its praises usually aren’t the ones paying the API bills. But when Peter & Boris tell you something, you look closer. Same thing happened with agent skills — Simon W saw something early, and that became the biggest hammer in our AI toolbox. Types of loops ## The public discourse mixes loops with loop “engineering,” so let’s disambiguate. One-shot loops ### Today, an agent can execute a task, have an independent judge review the result1, apply the feedback, and repeat. You put a cap on the number of loops. Or you let it run until it’s “satisfied” — a bad idea. These are easy to set up. Many people are already…