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The Agentic Loop: Three loops in a trench coat
- philipwhiuk 2mo agoAren't the loops the wrong way round in the diagram. The tightest loop is the inference loop, then the tool loop and then human loop?
- btables 2mo agoI think of them from the outside in, so that's why I illustrated it that way.
- huflungdung 2mo ago[dead]
- NitpickLawyer 2mo agoFascinating. I think it's the first time I've heard it put that way. For me it's more intuitive the other way around, as the "outer" loops increase in complexity (and can have additional separate loops running inside them). It also makes sense because you can always add more (meta) loops that way.
- DonHopkins 2mo agoYou are absolutely correct. It's an i18n/l10n issue. They spin in the opposite direction in the other hemisphere.
- saghm 2mo agoOh no, what happens when I flush my agents from one hemisphere down the toilet in the other then?
- BeetleB 2mo agoNot true. This is a common LLM hallucination. See https://www.britannica.com/story/do-toilets-in-different-hemispheres-flush-in-different-directions https://www.britannica.com/story/do-toilets-in-different-hem...
- DonHopkins 2mo agoOf course they hallucinate. They are spinning backwards!
- swyx 2mo agothere are more than 3: https://www.latent.space/p/loopcraft https://www.latent.space/p/loopcraft
- jamestimmins 2mo agoThe issue I have with loops is that for truly complex work, where I care about building a generalized solution for a complex problem, the agents frequently reward hack and end up burning indefinitely without finishing until I step in. Curious how you're addressing this
- gwerbin 2mo agoEven with Claude Code and Opus I genuinely don't understand how people are actually doing productive things with these loops. Unmanaged by humans, these things go deep, deep into their own pits of internal domain language, depth-first development, and tail-chasing. The stuff that I've seen at work produced by people exploring these kinds of "meta loop" approaches typically have a high ratio of slop and fluff to useful code and documentation. (I haven't tried Fable yet, but people have been writing about this stuff long before Fable came out so that shouldn't count.) It makes sense for something like autoresearch because you're trying to exhaustively explore a space that would be impossible for a human to explore by hand. But for something like building the software to run a business, there's absolutely no way I would trust anything like this. It's ultimately just superpowered vibecoding, giving you the ability to churn out more slop faster, not build useful things faster. Show me one example of a successful application developed using this kind of meta-meta-loop architecture. Supposedly Claude Code itself is entirely AI generated code, but it's not a `while` loop, it still has a team of designers and developers. (Also this meta-loop stuff is different from the tactical-level Ralph Wiggum loop stuff. That's a strategy to make smaller/weaker LLMs perform like better LLMs, using say 5x more tokens but at 1/10 the cost per token so that the cost-benefit math works out.)
- btables 2mo agoTotally. Earth's rotation is a loop too. We should count that.
- draw_down 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- tptacek 2mo agoYou can always find more loops if you want to write the next version of this post. Anything that runs software is a loop of instruction execution.
- perching_aix 2mo agoThe programming equivalent of "it's only a question of where did they hide the circle" in math? :)
- jabenhaim 2mo ago[flagged]
- cheschire 2mo agoAnyone have suggestions on implementing loops with a basic $20/mo subscription to claude or gemini? Any blog posts recommended?
- gexla 2mo agoThe article is describing how every harness functions. If you're already using Codex, Claude Code, or Antigravity then you're already doing this. And you get a lot of usage. I generally don't hit my limits with GPT if I stick to reviews of code that cheaper models create. Google gives you a low number of free requests. OpenCode has a generous free tier for open source models (and a plan that is $5 / month for the first month.)
- cheschire 2mo agoThe article describes API calls using code. How does one use these loops in Claude Code (assuming you mean CLI not cloud) or Antigravity (assuming you mean agy not the IDE)?
- solumunus 2mo agoThe article is describing how agents work. You can either read it only to gain that understanding, or read it because you’re trying to build your own version of Claude Code. “How can we use these loops in Claude Code?” doesn’t make any sense.
- cheschire 2mo agoOh, interesting. So am I understanding correctly then that the tools that come with monthly subscriptions are inherently limited and unable to expand to what the article describes in the outermost loops?
- solumunus 2mo agoAre you asking if it’s possible to add custom tools to CC/Codex which it can then use? If not, please clarify what you mean.
- bicepjai 2mo agoI like how you found the pattern of 3 loops. I am working on a similar blog where I had human loop outside the inference loop :) human -> llm-> tool
- argestes 2mo agolack of syntax highlighting makes the article harder to read
- otekengineering 2mo agothose are rookie numbers, my agent harness goes way more than 3 loops deep, and the depth dynamically ebbs and flows throughout the development process. like most brags, i'm being defensive over a personal tool that i know has ballooned way too big, but building a token-fueled katamari ball that rolls itself uphill has been a fun way to imagine Sisyphus happy. a harness is a chain connecting two other chains, the LLM and the human are themselves made up of loops within loops within loops.