what is agent looping
for the last two years we prompted agents one task at a time. that is starting to change
instead of asking an agent to build the landing page and then driving every step yourself, you set up a loop that handles discovery, planning, the work, checking, and iterating until the goal is met
looping is a setup you build. almost any agent harness can run it, it just depends on how you wire it up
at its simplest, looping is one agent working on itself:
> researches
> drafts
> checks the draft against a goal
> fixes what is weak
> runs that cycle again until the work clears the requirements
you are not prompting each step anymore. the agent repeats the cycle for you
the bigger version is a fleet looping. you give an orchestrator agent a goal, it breaks the goal into pieces, hands each piece to a specialist agent, and those specialists hand smaller jobs to their own subagents
the whole tree keeps looping through discovery, planning, execution, and verification until the goal is met
one agent looping is like a person redoing their own draft. a fleet looping is a whole team running a project end-to-end
you create a goal, and the system runs the loop until it finishes within the reqs you set
open and closed looping:
OPEN LOOPING is exploratory. it still has conditions and a goal, but you give the agent or the fleet a wide space to move in. it can try different paths, discover things, build something you did not fully spec out
this is the exciting end, it is what Peter and others are doing, and tbh it is where I want to spend more time
the catch is cost, an open loop with real room to explore burns an insane amount of tokens. for the 90 percent of people without an unlimited budget it is not runnable yet, and pointed at projects with a loose standard it turns into a slop machine
CLOSED LOOPING is bounded. a human designs the end-to-end path first:
> clear goal
> defined steps
> an eval at each step
> a point where it stops or hands back to you (and feeds back performance data)
the agents still loop, but inside framework you built. it gets better every run because each pass feeds the next, and it runs on a normal budget because the path is tight.
for most marketing work, closed is the one that pays off today.
> the orchestrator owns the goal
> the specialists own the steps
> the subagents do the narrow work
> an eval gate make sure its not slop
Anthropic engineers finally showed how they actually use Claude Code internally
31 minutes of internal workflow that most Claude users will never see on their own
here's what they cover:
> how to set up project context files the right way
> custom commands that save hours of repeated work
> hooks that make Claude behave exactly how you need
> subagents and how to actually spec them properly
"your agent isn't the problem, your spec is"
the people who understand how Claude Code actually works inside Anthropic are shipping things everyone else thinks requires a whole team
that's exactly why I put together a breakdown of Claude features most people have never discovered
you can find it below
Karpathy's 4 rules took coding accuracy from 65% to 94%.
most devs haven't read them.
the ones who did set up 21 rules total.
82,000 people on GitHub figured this out.
you're looking at all 21.
save this
I promise this will be the best 20 min you spend today! Robotics: Endgame, the sequel to my last year's Sequoia AI Ascent talk, "Physical Turing Test". I laid out the roadmap for solving Physical AGI as a simple parallel to the LLM success story. Be a good scientist, copy homework ;)
And stay till the end, more easter eggs and predictions for your polymarket!
00:30 DGX-1 origin story at OpenAI, I was there in 2016 signing with Jensen and Elon. Heading to the Computer History Museum!
01:42 The Great Parallel
03:31 Robotics, the Endgame
03:39 Why VLAs fall short
04:32 Video world models as the 2nd pretraining paradigm
06:09 World Action Models (WAM)
07:46 Strategies for robot data collection and the FSD equivalent to physical data flywheel for robot manipulation
11:06 EgoScale and the Dexterity Scaling Law we discovered recently
14:00 Physical RL: bridging the last mile
15:39 DreamDojo: an end-to-end neural physics engine for scaling RL in silico
17:00 Civilizational Technology Tree and my predictions for the near future. Spoiler: it's closer than you think.
Thanks to my friends at Sequoia for inviting me back to AI Ascent this year! I had a blast! Last year's talk is attached in the thread if you missed it.
LLM Knowledge Bases
Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So:
Data ingest:
I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them.
IDE:
I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides).
Q&A:
Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale.
Output:
Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base.
Linting:
I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into.
Extra tools:
I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries.
Further explorations:
As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows.
TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.