Loop Engineering
also: agent loops · outer loop
Designing the system that prompts your agent for you — trigger, framing, verification, state, and a stopping condition.
Loop engineering is the level above prompt and context engineering: instead of typing the next instruction, you design the repeating cycle that runs the agent — a trigger (heartbeat, cron, hook, or goal), task framing from external state, an independent verification step, and an explicit stopping condition checked by machinery, not judged by the model. Popularized in June 2026 (Addy Osmani, building on Peter Steinberger and Boris Cherny).