The Coming Loop

camillomiller

Show me the billion dollar solopreneur startup, or the profit increase for companies and at that point I’ll start thinking that this tasteless high level wanking might make sense in some way

JodieBenitez

> For now I have not moved past the point of comprehension being important to me. Ah ! This is me too... at least for what I have to ship at work. Not so much for my toy/weekend projects. But it turns out agents are also good at explaining.

ramon156

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good. > opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option. I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my current state.

gcanyon

I'm a software developer from way back, using tools and languages that coding agents are far less familiar with. So when I use an agent to write code, it's in languages I'm less familiar with, and often using libraries I know nothing about. All to say, my part of the process often ends up being: 1. "Here's what I'm looking for, in detail" 2. "That's not right. Here's one way it's not right, and a specific example. Please fix that." 3. Sometimes I give suggestions for how what is going wrong might be happening, or conceptually how to work around the issue. 4. And iterate on 2-3 until the result is close enough. That's a loop I'd love to automate.

topce

my experimental looping build on top of pi and zx mostly pi deep seek and some skills ;-) https://github.com/topce/pizx

piker

We used a “loop” before it was called that to drive MS-DOC support into Tritium. Based on that experience, I take issue with this: “There are already impressive examples of large automatic porting efforts, including the reported work around moving parts of Bun from Zig to Rust.” (Emphasis added.) It will be impressive if/when the Bun team is able to pick up and continue extending and supporting Bun. For us, MS-DOC remains read-only and probably perpetually buggy until we reimplement with a better understanding. Until then, it’s definitely not “impressive”. Functional? Maybe. Impressive, no.

mccoyb

Loops work when you spend the proper amount of time to understand what you want ahead of time. The prerequisite is clarity — enough clarity that you could write a careful specification that you could hand off to a junior colleague. Often, it takes 5-6 broken crappy versions of a thing until you understand that. There is no accelerating the 5-6 broken crappy versions - there’s no agent tech that’s going to help your meat brain avoid thinking time. So most of my time is iterating between these two phases: I don’t understand what I want, I need to read and write and play with code, okay it’s been long enough I think I know what I want (it is extremely easy to deceive yourself) … okay now I do actually know what I want and I can write a loop. Many people think they can jump ahead with agents. You cannot fake understanding or clarity. It is painfully obviously when someone skipped that meat brain understanding phase.

nfcampos

My own thoughts on this, with examples https://github.com/nfcampos/loop-dev/blob/main/README.md

codeDruid

Yeah I don't know. Don't get me wrong, the article points makes sense. But sometimes I think that we're going to stay near this current point of productivity for a little while. Currently my org of 8 people use around 1000 euro worth of tokens per month. We've recently had a discussion near the water-cooler, that if the cost climbs 5x-10x it may be just more worth it to get more developers (we're EU based). While the tools work and are definitely nice, even in our little org with our little budget, using Opus 4.8 we've noticed code quality going down. If I had to bet money, I'd bet that the models will get 30-50% more nice, around 2x more expensive and we will settle into some mode where we'll use llms for some tasks, manually doing others and calling places focusing on speed at any cost some funny name like "gulags, 996, sweatshops, etc" and collectively try to somewhat avoid those places, which will need to offer a premium to attract talent. Wishful thinking.

hakanderyal

I think this is a common sentiment among heavy users of AI that also still cares about code quality. I've built up a skill harness and review flow that makes Opus generate slop-free code 90% of the time. But the remaining 10% requires me to stay at the helm. Especially in the early stages. I would love to use loops to automate more, but I couldn't do it with the current generation models. And on the back of my mind I'm still evaluating the possible future where we are forced to API pricing. I'm currently paying $400 for Opus, and use around 1.5-2 billion tokens per day. This will cost around $20k/m with API pricing. And I don't want to even imagine the possible scenario of getting locked out of frontier models because of politics. Will the models get better to cut me out of the loop completely? I believe so. Will the open source models catch up tho SOTA models, and diversify from China-only? I hope so. Otherwise 2 superpowers will wield a soft power that can cripple the tech industries of all other countries.

yanis_t

I keep thinking about at which point I should not force myself into the loop. As a developer I really like working on the code structure, making it clearer, thinking about good abstraction, breaking into modules, etc. I really take pleasure in it. At the same time I understand that at some point I am becoming the limiting factor. If the point of the software is benefit people, should I still care about how the code looks. Right now, I still think that the answer is yes, but in 3 years? in 10 years?

m0llusk

One of the biggest problems with LLMs has turned out to be the cost of actually running them and this strategy functions as a usage multiplier.

CraigJPerry

> My current status is that I have not had much success with this way of working for code I deeply care about If something is judgement heavy, "code i care deeply about", then i don't really agree with the direction of travel here. Don't try to delegate decisions you care deeply about. I do like the framing of agent loop vs harness loop, but only delegate stuff that you can accurately specify in advance, that usually means stuff that's repeatable in my case ("hey go see how i did X, do that but for Y"), and that inherently means stuff that's predictable. For stuff where lack of my judgement as input is just going to cause me to say "no", we're down to collaborating in the "agent loop" as Armin puts it. And that's totally fine. It's fast, but also safe. Remember before AI coding assistants, sometimes you'd get an engineer join your team who was SUPER productive, your peers would be jealous "oh yeah but you guys only got all that done because you have X on your team!" - they didn't live the curse of having that kind of person around - if you don't have them PERFECTLY aligned, then they run off at break neck speed in the wrong direction.

joenot443

We've had great success with agents thus far at my job. A year into Clauding and all our dev metrics are up while our downtime has remained steady. Being an iOS engineer, much of my engineering cycle these days is going from Figma/PRD → spec → code. After being handed off to QA, we handle the bugs and product slips as they come through, while we simultaneously build/spec the upcoming addition. This is basically the same agile style that's been popular for 20y, just super-powered with agents. How might someone accomplish the same goals using loops instead?

sandrello

This is a very fatalistic take. While I understand where it's coming from, I try not to share the same mindset: engineers getting increasingly distant from how things are getting built is not something that will "undoubtedly happen, whether we like it or not". Also: > Now there is obviously a question if this desire to understand the code is one that I will still have a few years from now. I do not think we should be having doubts like this. Either you consider understanding the code you ship and allowing your future self to be able to work on the system you're building to be a value, or you don't. I, for one, do, and I do not think using LLMs and coding agents will affect my point of view on that.

mattchew

This is the best essay on agentic coding I've read. Clear thinking and writing, pragmatic about the future of agent-led coding. If you usually skip straight to the comments, you might want to actually read this one.

duendefm

I honestly wonder if this kind of stuff really brings something to the table. Like I use opus for sometime and certainly I can put it to good use and optimize some parts of my day to day job (programmer). But it fails so hard in such simple tasks that it seems to me that putting it in loop can't just magically make everything better, unassisted. Does anyone actually uses agents and loops to create new software, new technology? Has anyone created with those systems, software they couldn't produce otherwise technologically wise? Or is it at best just an accelerator, cutting off on the building time?

galoisscobi

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhausted. We've also had some management pressures where they think people are wasting time looking at code. Perhaps because some podcast they might be listening to, somebody says coding is largely solved. > 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. This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion. I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious. He's at the center of an important technological revolution and it would be hard not to get excited. I just wished he advocated for a more balanced and a realistic perspective.

intended

I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise: Looping seems to (currently) be a side effect of token subsidies. If token costs are nil, then you can afford to run verification and generation through the same models. If token costs are high, then you will go broke verifying code sprawl. Currently costs are (mostly) absent from the conversation, even though costs are what decide the limits which shape experience. Also: Firms can be held liable for the products they sell, so if code cannot be reviewed then that code is essentially a law suit waiting to happen. I believe this is what customers will be demanding in the future: someone to hold accountable when things go wrong.

jwpapi

The issue is that whilst the loops will initially lead to good results they will be less and less as context gets bigger and bigger and tougher to understand for human and AI. So it depends really on the size of your project.