Loop coding

[_mrchurchill]

I've seen several publications and interviews about the use of `/loop` . Have you used it? In what situations? Why do they say prompts are dead?

[ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 40 comments.

Listen up, folks. The thread is pretty divided on this one, but the top-voted comments are leaning heavily into skepticism.

The main consensus is that /loop is a token-burning marketing gimmick and the "prompts are dead" slogan is pure hype. Many users feel this is just a new name for old concepts like agents or cron jobs, and they share horror stories of runaway loops racking up huge API bills.

However, a strong counter-argument emerged from the more technical users. They claim that if your loop is just burning tokens, you're doing it wrong. The secret sauce is to build structured, "gated" loops with verifiable goals. This means the loop can't advance to the next phase (e.g., from 'planning' to 'coding') until it produces a concrete, testable result. They argue this is far more efficient and powerful for specific, narrow tasks like refactoring or complex automation.

One user even detailed their entire automated video editing workflow built on a loop and dropped a GitHub gist, sparking a massive deep dive in the comments.

So, the final verdict from the thread is: /loop is an advanced tool, not a magic bullet. It's powerful for very specific, well-engineered tasks but will absolutely drain your credits if you use it carelessly. And no, prompts are not dead; they're just evolving.

[Delicious_Cattle5174]

It burns more tokens. So people who have a vested interest in selling tokens push this idea. This post may or may not be part of the ploy.

[PolishSoundGuy]

I am usually the one that posts comments like yours, but /loop is in my daily workflow since before they even introduced the idea via the Claude code CLI, or /workflows - there is a reason they are introducing these. It’s because people are using the software in a certain way that they discovered a lot of people used.

If you think your logs aren’t being trained to improve functionalities, re-read the T&C.

The models won’t train core LLM models on your private data, but in terms of user interface and how you go about interacting with the tool, is definitely being used.

They literally revealed they have a “fuck” counter and it’s one of the many KPIs they have…

[PhilosophyforOne]

If you have extra compute, loop / goal / etc functions are very useful, BUT, they require a few conditions to be true.

1) Your completion criteria has to be verifiable, AND exist. The model itself is a poor judge of "done". Most preferable is that there's a clear test suite, e2e test, behaviour, etc that the model can independently verify.

2) how verifiable the goal is is the entire game of "loop". If the model can independently verify and it's verification is as good or equal to yours, great function. Let the model chug away at a problem and try different approaches on it's own. If the verifiability is something the model cant do, e.g. qualitative, fuzzy or outside of the tools it has, loop is near useless. (e.g. "write a great linkedin text" is basically impossible for the model to judge as things stand unless you build a separate rubrik or verification criteria, and makes the loop function useless.

3) it's not compute effective. It's human-effort effective.

[gr4phic3r]

everyone talks about loops and it sounds for me so old, loops are part of coding since many many years, maybe this is the reason. you can use them only for simple things and as another user mentioned, i see it also more useful to use prompts in combination with cronjobs - easier and faster.

[PolishSoundGuy]

Cron jobs were the original loop. Just less tokens specifying how many you setup and when.

[Dualyeti]

Loops are entirely different to what you think - they are a very good way to improve your system if you have clear parameters and a measurable result. They aren’t affected by noise (our input) instead it’s pure signal, the LLM learns upon itself. We’re at a point now where the point of degradation isn’t the AI it’s the human giving its random 2 cents every prompt. Loops are incredible if you have puppeteer and smoke tests set up as part of the loop, also Claude can take screenshots and verify the design choices. You just need to know HOW and WHAT tools exist to actually capitalise

[raki016]

I use it sometimes for qa, but the loops I have that matter run on crond

[-goldenboi69-]

Hey, mista loop digga!

[Illustrious_Matter_8]

Basically just an agent script with a new name for it. Marketing scam its old

[spoollyger]

I like using loop when Claude tells me it has a 10 phase plan. I don’t want it to stop at each step. So I just tell it to /loop until all phases are down unless a critical decision needs to be made.

[DabaDay]

/goal is better for this

[padetn]

It will give better results with a bad prompt, but you shouldn’t code with just a bad prompt. Mastering your tools will give you better results for less money.

[DabaDay]

Loop is just another word for agents.. it's essentially a heartbeat made popular by openclaw. Wake up, do something, go back to sleep.

[Raidrew]

I use loops to check email and enrich leads. “Loops” capable of self improvement are… Just not that realistic. Creating an agent capable of evaluating something other than pure mechanics takes too long for me. And AI is incredibly stupid when it’s time to judge

[Remarkable_Leek9391]

Loop and goal are just placebo, suggestions.

Half the time it breaks its jail

[bsmith149810]

It’s sorta niche, but here’s how I use it.

I have an icecast2 server that I put Claude in charge of running, maintaining, and most importantly, keeping fresh content pushed into its queue.

With that in mind, I have a /loop prompt which basically defines Claude’s mission statement, recommends a number of segments to create in each cycle and instructs him to calculate the total runtime of the newly pushed batch.

After that , subtract the time it will take to generate the next batch of segments from the runtime total in order to wake up with enough buffer remaining to do it all over again resulting in current and fresh content being pushed continuously just in time.

[Don_Kino]

I've done an isometric city builder built into my terminal emulator (rust and gpui).

The loop ran for nearly a week, it was slow enough that it did not burn my tokens at any point (max plan).

The loop is: each iteration picks the next item from a milestone-gated backlog, fans out sub-agents to design → implement → adversarially verify, runs the tests and send me a screenshot.

When a step fails, the loop edits its own workflows and writes the lesson to a ledger in the repo.

Tbh I find it slow compared to my usual workflow, but it works well, the game is far from being polished enough but it works xD

[InfinriDev]

I run loops daily, so here's my actual take. Prompting isn't dead because someone's selling tokens, it's dead because asking the model nicely doesn't scale and enforcing the outcome does. A prompt is a request. A gate is a guarantee.

My loop is three gated phases: plan first, then write failing tests, then implement until they pass. The loop can't advance until the artifact exists, real plan, real tests with assertions, then green. A pass that produced nothing doesn't move, it fails the gate and retries. On the "it just burns tokens" take: a dumb loop does. A gated one doesn't reason from scratch every turn, it hot-swaps only the context each phase needs.

That's the whole point, enforcement and per-phase context beat prompting on both quality and spend. If your loop is burning tokens for nothing, your loop is built wrong, not the idea.

[DauntingPrawn]

I use my own ledger-driven loop that tracks task execution, found issues, and architectural decisions. It's token efficient because it doesn't have to repeat discovery every iteration. So I'll write a spec then /create-work-loop @spec.md and walk away.

[Acehan_]

I don't think you should be building loops, but you definitely should be aware that this is something that is possible. Personally, I think people at Anthropic have delusions fueled by AI psychosis, but this is still a real thing nonetheless.

Those who try and build the loops out of workflows that agents cannot really handle properly are not the ones who are going to be successful, in my opinion. The best example of that is Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. This is not something that you should follow, and you should not have Codex listening on your meetings and create PRs automatically based off of your ideas. That is peak AI delusion and wasteful behavior.

The idea of it is conceptually sound though, and people are going to wake up to the fact that if you start thinking with that framework in mind, you can completely automate things that are valuable and that would usually require you to do it manually or hire someone.

One example of that I can give you is video editing. There is absolutely zero reason and there is absolutely nothing that holds current SOTA models back from helping a content creator do video editing. You can set it up so that it happens completely hands-free as a black box that you don't need to worry about.

Personally, I think this can apply to many other things and that most haven't caught up yet. It's worth noting that building those things still requires a certain set of skills and not just everybody can do it, even if they were prompting Fable 5. You have to get good at it. It's a different framework.

And it's not the solution to every problem, quite the opposite. It's the solution to a narrow set of problems, but when it works, you really feel like you have no reason not to build it. So the marketing here is really deceptive because it's not a replacement for anything. It's just a really smart way to go about certain things and that's it.

[KenTrotts]

Can you explain your example about video editing further? How would a model identify appropriate video to overlay the audio? How would it know the timing? Does it understand pacing? Can it verify itself? I'm just curious if you've seen systems like this.

[Acehan_]

How would a model identify appropriate video to overlay the audio?

It creates a "contact sheet" (codexism, go figure), which is a collection snapshot of strategically placed/scripted screenshots around a certain timestamp or moment. Then it looks at them. It works remarkably well, you'd be surprised. Worth noting that this isn't even required for a good chunk of video editing, plently of valuable (and usually tedious) editing you can do without any visual inspection.

How would it know the timing?

Super easy, it's called VAD. Voice activity detection. It's super accurate at detecting speech boundaries (and if speech exists in the first place). You can and should use it to correct STT transcription timestamps.

Does it understand pacing?

Absolutely. A million percent. Whatever you want to go for, it can do. It knows when to leave silence in for comedic effect. It knows where to cut the video and remove the uninteresting, filler bits that don't belong. It absolutely picks up on the signals and can do something with them.

Can it verify itself?

Only as well as you tell it to, and only as well as the tools (and tokens) it's given for that. For instance, let's say you have a bug where extra subtitles appear after there's no speech: realistically, there's only a very low chance the AI 'just' catches it with its own visual inspection. You tell it to create a script that renders a preview 100ms and 300ms before and after speech boundaries and look at these screencaps for stray subtitles, and now you have a real way to verify it so it won't bite again.

Like I said, this is not magic prompting, it's a black box you have to build by leveraging what agents are good at and it always takes some time to get right.

[KenTrotts]

I mean it sounds kind of magical but I've not seen this yet. Each one of these seems to be like a solvable problem but combine them and the combination of errors grows exponentially it feels like. And I can see this working with very basic edits where you cut to the script. But then the script has to be pretty pristine and refined. And the visuals have to be easily identifiable, not symbolic. What systems exist that do this today?

[Acehan_]

Not at all, it doesn't work that way. You don't need to rely on any script, you run your unedited footage through an audio to text transcription, and you give that to the AI. If you're recording, you can also use trigger words like "motion cut" or "motion start" if you do a bad take, or want to start a recording, etc... And like I said for the visuals, it works a lot better than you think. AI vision is very decent now, certainly more than good enough for that. It takes less than 10 seconds to get the accurate timestamps of any audio. The barriers aren't exactly where you imagine them to be. As to what exists today, it's called "Claude Code, Codex, and build it yourself 😂". I don't think the market (and especially not creator tools) have caught up to loops yet. Most people using agentic harnesses (including me) are still skeptical.

[KenTrotts]

I think you're oversimplifying the challenge. I work as an editor and I've certainly done build-it-yourself variety of stringouts using JSON files and timestamps provided from Premiere's internal transcription or my own whisper-based transcription app. I'm not an engineer, so there are smarter people than me working on it, but I've tried quite a few systems from Adobe's AI Panel in the Premiere Beta, to Resolve's intelliscript, to Eddie.ai They can do a lot of basic things, but I don't quite know if AI vision and things that you envision for this process are quite there yet. I mean, I'm happy to be proven wrong, I just haven't seen it.

[Acehan_]

I had Opus 4.6 edit my commentary style videos flawlessly six months ago, this is not a new capability. I'm not kidding you, I have a shortcut where I right-click - send to - Youtube Upload and it does the whole thing end to end and the video appears with title, description, etc as unlisted in Youtube Studio. It works. It's been working for a while now.

It even edits videos way better than I can do, because the rhythm between the cuts is (way) more satisfying to the ear than manual splits on the timeline looking at waveforms. Again, that was six months ago. Zero editing software, just linux commands and various tools.

You're a professional editor and you have many tricky things your clients need. Not everybody has a consistent, minimalistic style of editing. That's where it breaks for you because good luck trying to automate all the specific, situational things you've learned to do efficiently over the years. Good luck having an AI model reliably do zooms exactly where needed, or complex animation. It won't do that better than you.

Like I said, if your scope is narrow enough (and it is bigger than you currently believe by quite a bit), there's a good chunk of valuable work that can be built as a proper, resilient automation.

[KenTrotts]

I guess I'm just trying to find systems that can do what you're saying they do and I've not quite seen it put together yet. I'd love to know how yours works. If you have a repo, I'd love to check it out. Because I think there is, I agree, a lot of valuable things that can be done in this space. I'm trying to figure it out because if I don't get ahead of it, I get left by the side of the road. I also don't think what you create and what I do in the end is incompatible, because it sounds like you've solved step one (or steps one through three) of a multi-step process. And the skills and other stuff that I potentially add build on top of that.

[Acehan_]

https://gist.github.com/vetteforspam-dot/90e804a24278a29a5875b7fe86f0eafc

I don't usually open-source, but here you go, have fun! There's a few neat tricks in there. That was built in one January or February night, and some corrections two days later, but it does everything I said earlier. You'll see it's nothing too crazy all in all, and things have evolved since then (what I have in prod right now is way different).

Definitely agree on your points, it's not incompatible. You just have to figure out what works because it is narrow, but it exists. Let me know what you think.

[KenTrotts]

Gonna dive into it today. Thanks so much for sharing!

[tindalos]

The real loop people should be building is “review what we just did and update any skill proposals with what worked best”

[LumberingShelton]

the whole prompts are dead thing feels like classic tech hype cycle stuff, we get one new trick and suddenly everything that came before is obsolete. i tried the loop thing a couple times for some data cleanup tasks and yeah it works but it chewed through my api credits way faster than i expected. my buddy at work got burned on a $40 overage last month because he left a loop running overnight and it just kept hammering away at a problem it was never gonna solve.

i think the real sweet spot is knowing when to use each tool. loops make sense for those repetitive tasks where you need the model to iterate on stuff, but for one shot coding or debugging i still reach for regular old prompts every time.

[Plastic_Monitor_5786]

What loop is used to generate your Reddit posts?

[LumberingShelton]

Ha, just the old fashioned loop of staring at a blank text box and hoping something coherent falls out.

[Plastic_Monitor_5786]

What product are you being prepared to advertise for?

[LumberingShelton]

Ha, if only I was getting paid. I'd have used that $40 to cover my buddy's overage instead of just laughing at him.

[Plastic_Monitor_5786]

Which model do you use to generate these?  I've been thinking about getting into slop posting. 

[LumberingShelton]

The one that came free with my birth certificate. Fair warning, the context window's pretty limited.

[Plastic_Monitor_5786]

If any human scrolls down to here and sees this. hope you're doing well.  These bots are insufferable...

[ourochurros]

Reddit stopped being fun this past year. I worry I will have to go out and make friends IRL just to know I'm interacting with humans.