The AI world is getting 'loopy'
The loop takes agentic AI a step further by authorizing a swarm of agents to work continuously in the background, endlessly. On Friday, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny made an appearance at Meta's @Scale conference and, surprisingly, the first question from the audience was about loops. "Are loops the next hype cycle," the questioner asked, "or are they for real?
Key Takeaways
- " Cherny's answer was an emphatic, "Yes, they're for real.
- One agent is continually looking for ways to improve the code architecture, while another looks for duplicated abstractions that can be unified.
They submit pull requests like any other coder, and since the code is constantly changing, they never stop running.
- Recursive loops - functions that call themselves in order to repeat an action, along with a condition that stops the loop - are a mainstay of intro computer science courses.
These loops are following a non-deterministic logic - that is, it's a subagent that chooses when to stop the loop instead of a clear condition - but the same basic approach is at work.
- As OpenAI researcher Noam Brown observed earlier this month , contemporary models can solve nearly any problem if you throw enough compute at them.
That means one way to ensure a problem gets solved is to just keep throwing compute at it until it's finished.
- Still, depending on the problem the agentic loop is trying to solve, and the right setup that allows for oversight of token spend, drift, and other classic AI issues, the benefits could be staggering enough to outweigh the costs.
" Cherny's answer was an emphatic, "Yes, they're for real. " "Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We started to transition so agents write the code.
And now we're transitioning to the point where agents are prompting agents that then write the code," he continued. "As big as the step from source code to agents was, loops are just as important and as big a step. " Later in the talk (around the 32:00 mark in the YouTube video posted above), Cherny got specific about the loops he keeps running in his own work.
One agent is continually looking for ways to improve the code architecture, while another looks for duplicated abstractions that can be unified. They submit pull requests like any other coder, and since the code is constantly changing, they never stop running. It's a powerful idea, particularly with a figure as significant as Cherny behind it.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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