Stop prompting. Start writing loops.

Latent Space's June 12 AINews issue gave a name to something I've felt building in my own projects for months. They call it "loopcraft," and the thesis is blunt: the skill that matters now isn't prompting a coding agent, it's designing the loops that prompt it for you. Latent Space pulls a quote from Boris Cherny that's going to get repeated all year. "I don't prompt Claude anymore. I write loops, the loops do the work." Karpathy frames the same idea as "removing yourself as the bottleneck."

I've been living this without a word for it. When I built the GraphRAG layer for Document Domain Agents, the breakthrough wasn't a better prompt. It was the moment I stopped typing instructions and started writing a harness that retried, verified, and re-dispatched on its own. The piece frames competitive advantage as knowing when to descend into a lower loop for reliability and ascend to a higher one as the models get good enough to trust. That matches my experience exactly. The hard part isn't the prose you feed the model. It's deciding which decisions you keep and which you delegate.

What makes this more than a vibe is how it converges with everything else in the feed today. Claude Code shipped nested subagents five levels deep. A pattern finding flagged "recursive, observable agent hierarchies" as the new default. An arXiv paper argues "agentic software" is a genuine restructuring of what software is, with code treated as ephemeral scaffolding under a reasoning core. Loopcraft is the builder-facing name for all of it.

Here's the catch, and it's the thread that ties this whole issue together. Loops that prompt agents are loops that spend money and take actions while you're not watching. The same article that tells you to remove yourself as the bottleneck is implicitly telling you to remove the thing standing between an agent and your credit card. So yes, restructure your work as loops. I'm doing it. But the instrumentation has to come first, not as a follow-up. If you can't see what each loop iteration cost and did, you don't have loopcraft. You have a slot machine.

Start small. Take one repetitive task you currently babysit. A test-fix-retry cycle, a doc-update pass. Wrap it in a loop with an explicit iteration cap, a spend ceiling, and a log line per pass. That's the entry point.