Posts Tagged claude

For about two years, the unit of work with a coding agent was the prompt. You wrote a good one, you gave it enough context, you read what came back, and you wrote the next one. The agent was a tool, and you were holding it the entire time, one turn after another.

That part is ending. Addy Osmani, a director of AI at Google Cloud, has a name for what replaces it, and I have not stopped thinking about it since: loop engineering. You stop being the person who prompts the agent. You design the loop that prompts it for you.

In my phrasing: you stop being the thing that runs, and start designing the thing that runs. The leverage moves up a layer. What I want to do here is take an honest look at the pieces, and at the part nobody automates.

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Anthropic shipped a piece earlier this month called How Claude Code Works in Large Codebases. I have not read anything more useful about coding agents this year. The core claim, in their words: “the ecosystem built around the model—the harness—determines how Claude Code performs more than the model alone.” In my phrasing: in a real codebase, the model is the smaller variable. The layer of context and tooling you wire around the agent matters more than which version of Sonnet or Opus is behind it.

The post stays high-level, which is the right move for a launch piece. What I want to do here is land it. Same seven pieces, but with the wiring you would actually put in a repo, in the order I would put it.

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Twelve months ago, building an AI agent meant picking a framework, defining your tools, standing up a RAG pipeline, and writing a stack of glue code to wire it all together. That was the default playbook. The post-mortem on six months of work usually went the same way: half the time went into infrastructure that had nothing to do with the agent’s actual job.

That isn’t where the work is anymore. Most of the middle layer is gone. The SDKs ship with the tools, the skills system replaced the upfront tool registry, and longer context windows pushed vector search out of the default slot it held all of last year.

The shape is the same as a lot of infrastructure shifts before it. The hard thing got cheap, the cheap thing got expected, and the question moved up a level.

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Architecture diagrams are one of the most tedious aspects of infrastructure management. Teams spend countless hours manually creating and updating visual representations of their systems, only to see them become outdated the moment infrastructure changes.

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