AI Agents Are Not Magic. They Are Just Good Feedback Loops

Hello, I'm Rijul. I'm building git-lrc, a micro AI code reviewer that runs on every commit. It's free and source-available on GitHub. Star git-lrc to help more developers discover the project. Do give it a try and share your feedback Past few years, when things like GPT came out, we were mainly learning how to use them. Which basically meant using better prompts. So we were continuously refining prompts and trying to get better outputs. And that is fine. This was basically an exchange back and forth between us and the bot. We ask something. The AI responds. We refine our prompt. The AI responds again. This loop continues. Agents coming into the picture But now we are seeing the rise of AI agents. We see them everywhere, in every LinkedIn post, every YouTube video. The main idea behind agents is to hand over our work to them, and they will handle the remaining tasks with less constant back and forth compared to traditional chatbots. Here, agents are expected to work in loops. They do one thing. Then they review the result, identify additional things that need to be done, take action again, and repeat. The main input we give is usually a goal or a prompt. But this alone will not give us better control over how the agent works. Reliable agents also need things like success criteria, access to the right tools, feedback mechanisms, and rules for when to stop or ask for human input. The agent works in loops. So we need a better way to design and control these loops. Introducing Loop Engineering Agents perform tasks through loops. So instead of only focusing on prompt engineering, we also need to engineer the loop in which the agent operates. This is where Loop Engineering comes in. The term has recently gained attention as people started exploring better ways to build reliable workflows around AI agents. The idea is simple: Instead of only telling an agent what to do, we design the process that helps the agent complete the task reliably. Prompting is still an important pa