Replacing prompts with loops: an example

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny made a bit of a stir when he said: “I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.” That was followed by the "everything is a loop" essay by Geoffrey Huntley. It sounded sort of magical and I've been playing around with it since. Basically, you put a coding agent in a loop and let repeated attempts move the code towards a particular goal. I got the idea but the biggest source of skepticism for me was how to define the goal? How do we define the requirements that take us towards the goal, and why is this better than prompting? Once you throw in ideas like multi-agent review, it can sound like you need a small orchestration platform before you can try any of this. Turns out you don't. A useful loop can be one shell script built around a command you already run manually. Building on my last post about improving test performance, this post tackles a related problem: flaky tests…