Pattern: 'Loop Engineering' Is Consolidating as the Name for Designing Systems That Prompt Agents

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The framing — attributed to Peter Steinberger, drawing on Addy Osmani and Boris Cherny — is that you should stop prompting coding agents and start designing loops that prompt them, with six named building blocks: scheduling, worktrees, skills, plugins/MCP connectors, sub-agents in maker/checker splits, and durable state living outside the conversation. The distinction it draws between a 'harness' (the versioned runtime stack) and a 'loop' (a single scheduled execution pattern) is the useful part, because most practitioner writing conflates them. Starters targeting Grok, Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, and GitHub Actions signal the pattern is being written harness-agnostically.