wtf are loops?

Loop engineering is an emerging workflow pattern in the AI coding agent community where automated pipelines replace manual developer involvement in repetitive tasks. Instead of manually prompting agents, developers set up automated loops that triage GitHub issues, spin up coding agents to implement well-defined tasks, and open pull requests — with humans only reviewing at the final merge step. The approach involves writing good issue templates with clear acceptance criteria, using tools like Codex automations or cron jobs to trigger agents when AFK, and chaining multiple agents (spec agent → implementation agent → PR review agent) to handle the full development lifecycle. The Warp terminal team applies this at scale across thousands of open-source issues using similar labeling and triage automation.