Your Coding Agent Doesn't Need a Babysitter

Triggers, verifiable goals, and hard brakes: how to design loops that work while you don't.

Good morning!

If you code with Claude or Codex today, your workflow probably looks like this: write a prompt, accept all permissions, run tests, something breaks, paste the error back, try again.

Twenty minutes later, you realize you’re babysitting the exact process you wanted to offload. You’re doing the dumb work, not the thinking.

Most people think the fix is writing better prompts.

And that’s the wrong leverage point.

The people building Claude Code and Codex don’t prompt their agents anymore. They design loops — systems where the agent looks at the state, picks the next action, checks the result, and decides on its own whether to continue, retry, or stop.

I’ll show you what loop engineering actually is, how it’s different from a cron job, the 5 building blocks that make a loop work, and the 2 traps that will burn your token budget if you ignore them.

Watch the video (or read the article version here):