From wish to loop

One-shot prompting is a wish: describe, receive, hope. The agentic loop replaces hope with a cycle:

act → observe → correct → act again

The model writes code, runs it, reads the compiler's complaint, fixes, runs again — the way you work, at machine tempo. One-shot quality stopped being the interesting number the moment the model could see its own results.

But a loop is machinery, not magic. It has parts that can be engineered well or badly, and this chapter is about the two that decide whether it climbs at all.