Loop Engineering

Why pick it

The leverage point has moved. Peter Steinheimer: "You shouldn't be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt your agents." Boris Cherny (Head of Claude Code at Anthropic): "I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude."

Loop Engineering is the practical answer: patterns, starters, and CLIs for designing the control systems that orchestrate agents over time — so you stop being the person who prompts and start being the person who designs the loop.

What you get

• loop-init — scaffold skills, state, and budget files; prints your Loop Ready score (0–100) and first loop command.
• loop-audit — Loop Readiness Score CLI with constraints, governance, and harness runtime checks.
• 7 production patterns — daily-triage, bug-hunt, refactor, and more, each with cadence and token cost.
• 5 building blocks + memory — automations/scheduling, worktrees, skills, plugins/MCP, sub-agents, plus durable state.
• Companion CLIs — loop-cost (token spend), loop-sync (drift detection), loop-context (stateful memory + circuit breaker), loop-worktree (isolated git worktrees per attempt), loop-gate (path denylist + auto-merge allowlist).
• Ecosystem stack — memory → loop → harness-foundry → outerloop → fleet, each layer composable.

Why it over the others

vs Harness Engineering (OpenAI) — that's the essay on the philosophy (humans steer, agents execute, repo as system of record). Loop Engineering is the toolkit to put it into practice: scaffolds, scores, and CLIs you run today.

vs Compound Engineering — CE is a workflow loop inside one plugin (brainstorm → plan → work → review → compound). Loop Engineering is the meta-pattern catalog — 7 patterns you can run on any agent, with a readiness score and budget tracking to know when your loop is production-grade.

vs ECC — ECC is a full operating system with memory, hooks, and a dashboard. Loop Engineering is lighter and more focused: design the loop, score it, ship it. ECC is the runtime; Loop Engineering is the design discipline.

Works with

Grok, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode — swap --tool when scaffolding. MIT-licensed.

Quick start

npx @cobusgreyling/loop-init . — scaffolds your loop, prints your Loop Ready score, and tells you the first command to run. Add --with-foundry for a versioned harness runtime.

9k+ stars. Stop prompting. Design the loop. Get a score.