Hey folks,
A lot of chatter about loops on X recently. And it’s a topic I’ve been toying with. My interpretation from what Peter posted236 is:
Agents are loops, you give it a task, it looks at it with the context it has, uses tools to gather more and gives you an output when it thinks the task is done.
But mimicking those parts into a bigger system so your agents can run more autonomously, longer and on harder chunks of work is what I think ‘designing the loop’ is talking about.
So you want to design a bigger task up front, like a plan.md file with a bunch of tasks, new features to implement, etc. A way for those tasks to be deemed ‘complete, and verified’ - ie. does the report contain all 10 points from the plan, does the UI have all the features working correctly, do all the tests pass. And then prompting itself to go back to the plan.md file and pick up the next one.
I’ve been toying with it for this reference manual - I’m making lots of interactive components, so I’ve tried designing all the component pieces first and then building a workflow to compose those together into the interactive.
But also this is why a ton of people bring skills into their workflows. Do the planning skill, then split tasks with a PRD skill, then research skill for each feature, then building skill, then review skill, then testing skill.
It’s all designing text instructions for an agent to follow, making sure it can access any tools it needs to do the tasks.
Further reading:
Loop Engineering612 by Addy Osmani
WTF is a loop349 by Matt Van Horn (although AI-sloppy)
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Apple finally has a dedicated AI product, Siri AI208. Imagine about a year-old ChatGPT - with great dictation, image analysis and some interaction with external apps like Messages and Maps. Not bad *if* it works. The new Siri AI uses a mix of local and cloud models (some based on Gemini), all under the AFM 3 model family94. These models also power other “AI features”57 embedded inside apps. I’m keeping an eye out for the one that vibe-codes Safari extensions and Apple Shortcuts using plain English.
ChatGPT’s memory system134 runs a background process to save memories that you can see and edit. They are calling the latest iteration Dreaming v3, which has better recall, follows your long-term preferences more closely and corrects itself as time passes.
New blogpost from Anthropic160 claims that developers are writing 8x more code (with Claude’s help) than they were in 2025, and it is now helping train the next versions of Claude. Hence, they advocate for an “option” to pause AI development if the need arises.
OpenAI shared three goals104 for its next phase: build an automated AI researcher, accelerate the economy and give everyone on Earth a personal AGI. They’ve also filed a confidential S-161 while claiming no urgency for an IPO.
NotebookLM’s core chat201 is getting upgraded from the old RAG system to an agent-like system (Antigravity harness). Each notebook gets a cloud computer to run code for analysing the files that you’ve uploaded with the latest Gemini 3.5 models.
Your Oura ring scores sleep. Your Apple Watch tracks your heart. Workera Ambient does the same for your career: always-on, capability capture from the work that's already happening. Your data, your choice. Learn more from Workera's CEO167 and join the waitlist78.*
Cursor’s Canvas172 lets users spin up internal apps, dashboards and reports that are shareable with others. Another entry in the “Claude Artifacts but 2026” feature from all the coding agents.
Can Claude become a chemist90? What about powering agents for biology87?
Firecrawl Workflows186 - installable skills for repeatable web tasks (like deep research, SEO audits and more).
Eloquent190 - Local transcription app from Google (uses Gemma).
FrontierCode122 - coding eval to test whether code is actually maintainable rather than just passing tests.
A guide to using /goal in Codex227.
Fin Voice 2111 - natural, fast and intelligent customer support over the phone.
Raindrop 2.0118 - catches a production failure, hands it to your coding agent to fix, and turns it into an eval so it can't recur.
Cognition is guaranteeing up to $10M in credits if Devin underdelivers69 on an annual enterprise contract.
skills.sh206 by Vercel now has an API for querying its collection of 600k+ skills.
Upstash Agent Analytics102 - 3 lines of code to track AI/agent traffic to your website.
Spiral by Every129 - writing partner for humans and agents with stylometry, CLI, MCP/API, team styles.
Google is making its budget AI plan even cheaper186 ($7.99/mo to $4.99/mo) while offering 2x the storage space.
revived my old email app and it's so good? excited to really hone this into exactly what I need, as I use it
Google Colab CLI and Skills are out. Full Colab runtimes from your terminal. - GPU/TPU provisioning (colab --gpu A100) - Remote script execution (colab exec) - Interactive console/REPL access - Built-in agent skill Tell your agent "fine-tune Gemma 3 1B on this dataset" and it
@_philschmid127
I poured my 10 years of teaching experience into a skill. It's called /teach, and it can teach you anything. Here's how it taught me to solve a Rubik's cube:
Have been extensively testing Claude Workflows this weekend, with the best model possible. Threw it at my whole code base, combing for bugs. 144 found and fixed! Geez... It is a large code base, for sure, but 144?!! Some are very impactful, some are downright embarrassing...
@MParakhin110
In the first episode of our new series Full Stack, @conductor_build CEO and co-founder @charlieholtz takes us into the details of how he sets up his workflow for coding and managing AI agents. 00:00 – Building Conductor With Conductor 01:05 – Managing a Team of Coding Agents
@ycombinator180
Introducing text-to-lottie: an open source skill and harness for generating production ready Lottie animations with codex/claude code. $ npx skills add diffusionstudio/lottie Prompts guide and repo in the comments.
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Hey Siri, meet AI
what's the deal with loops
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