ai and ml

Prompting less and automating more comes with a price

Writing prompts is so … 2025! AI influencers and industry luminaries have declared that prompts are out and loops are in, and maddeningly this has become blog fodder and grist for the news cycle.

Never mind that AI agents, which are models using tools in a loop, have involved loops since people started yammering about them last year. Never mind that programming has always had constructs for repetition, even before the do-loop appeared in Fortran. 

The word from the AI-pilled is that if you're writing prompts and checking each response, as opposed to having AI agents address multi-step tasks with minimal input, you're doing it wrong.

The recent focus on loops can be attributed in part to Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw who went on to join OpenAI, even though the likes of Andrej Karpathy were writing about and implementing AI loops months earlier.

"Here’s your monthly reminder that you shouldn’t be prompting coding agents anymore," Steinberger wrote in a social media post on June 7. "You should be designing loops that prompt your agents."

Ed Zitron, the harbinger of AI doom, landed the first body blow with his reply: "Does OpenAI bill itself for its token spend?"

That's primarily what this is about – celebrating and evangelizing autonomous token consumption, spending that OpenAI and its peers would very much like to stimulate and capture. Imagine a for-profit but heavily indebted utility advising customers to remember to leave their lights and appliances on all night. That's about where we are.

To underscore the spending assumptions baked into loops über alles, Zitron in a recent post skewered Anthropic's Boris Cherny for his advocacy of loops as the successor to prompts: "Pretty convenient for a guy who’s allowed to burn upwards of $130,000 a month in tokens by Anthropic."

But back to the X thread: Gautham Pai, founder of corporate learning biz Jnaapti, answered Steinberger, "Oh god, LinkedIn will now start a new fad, 'Loop Engineering'. Harness Engineering is so last year. Loop Engineering is what you should be doing."

In response, Steinberger quipped, "Don’t worry it’ll take 3 months until it’s there. We’ll be talking about fleets that design your loops then."

A blog post titled "Loop Engineering" appeared that very day, not on LinkedIn, but on the blog of developer Addy Osmani. And unlike the humble-brag, jargon-strewn river of scintillating affirmation that is LinkedIn, Osmani's take is worthwhile if you happen to be actually trying to implement an AI agent loop.

His conclusion is particularly worthwhile, though it rather undercuts the whole idea of loops: "The loop changes the work, it does not delete you from it."

Another way to put that is, "Automate at your peril." If you set an inherently non-deterministic AI model on a task and expect flawless operation, you deserve to clean up the inevitable mess.

The major AI companies would love to see set-and-forget service consumption. Your job is to be the human in the loop. Your livelihood may depend on that. ®