Nobody Writes Prompts Anymore (Do THIS Instead)

**Julian Goldie** (0:00)
So today, I want to talk you through agent loops, how to use them, how I'm currently using them, the systems you can set up, and why you shouldn't be prompting, and instead using loops and designing loops that prompt your agents for you. And this is a tweet earlier this month from Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw. Loop engineering is pretty much everywhere that I look right now. So I want to guide you through how I'm using it, the systems I've set up, and also why you don't need to write the prompt anymore. Instead, you write the loop. So how does this work? What's the idea? Well, you stop prompting, you start looping. So the biggest names in AI, and Jensen Huang was talking about this, well, you see this tweet from Anatoly.
Well, he says basically nobody writes prompts anymore. The new job is to write and handle loops. And this is going to be a big thing this year. I think a lot of the systems that we see in the future, they're going to be self-iterating loops, because the difference is like, for example, if you're going into Claude and you're prompting it back and forth, you are the bottleneck, you are the constraint. You're the one who has to give all the feedback. You're the one who has to direct the agents. But who knows how to communicate with agents the best? Agents themselves. So what you want to do is have your agents looping around, self-iterating and improving. And the way this works is that the future isn't a clever prompt. It's a better loop. So you define what done looks like. An agent acts, an independent judge can check it. It repeats until it passes, whilst you go and do something else. And this is why looping beats prompting, and the four loop systems we've built into the agent operating system. And if you look at the system, your agents act, they observe. If it's good enough, great, we ship it. If not, it goes back. You've reason versus a goal, and that repeats and goes again. Now we've seen these updates recently with, for example, like Hermes and Codex where you have this forward slash goal set up and that's similar. And the way this works really is like you don't prompt. Instead, what you do is you engineer the loop, you build that together. And the smartest people in AI right now have stopped prompting. Adi Osmani from Google, Google engineer published an essay as well, that gave it a name which is loop engineering and an anatomy. So his line says it plainer than I can pretty much. He says you don't really need to be good at prompting anymore. The thing to get good at is the loop that allows the prompting for you. And this isn't like one corner of the internet. The man who built the coding agent everyone uses says the same, which is from Boris Czerny from Anthropic, creator of Claude Code, I don't prompt Claude anymore, I have loops that are running. They're the ones that are prompting Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write the loops. And on the biggest stage in the industry, Nvidia's GTC keynote, Jensen Huang declared the age of agents. He didn't describe a better prompt box, he described a loop. So you can think of the model is the brain, the harness is the body and the tools it uses working in a runtime. It understands the user's intent, observes context, reasons, plans, calls tools, and juggles working memory of long-term memory. And this isn't like theory. You know, it's already how the best shop in the world ships code. So 80% of production code Anthropic is now written by Claude, which only became possible once engineers stopped reviewing every single answer and started building loops that verify the work for them. So the way this works is you observe, you reason, you plan, you act, you verify, you repeat. And that's not a prompt. It's a loop running on its own. And that's the new default for doing this stuff. And the way you want to think about this is that one makes you the engine, the other makes you the architect. So here's the difference in plain terms.
With loop engineering, with prompting, well, if you were doing prompting, which is the old way, you are the loop because you type a prompt and wait, you read the answer, you spot what's wrong, you type again and again, nothing moves unless you're sitting there, one mistake, you start the thread over and your output is capped by your attention and your energy. With looping, the new way, you write the loop, it runs. So you define what done looks like, an agent acts, builds, writes and searches, an independent judge checks it against the goal. If it's not done, it loops around again on its own and it keeps going until the goal is truly met. And it can run whilst you sleep and you wake up to done. So if you think about where your time goes, it's the same job getting done, but prompting needs you the whole time. A loop needs you for about a minute.