miros (@m1rossgm) “teaching people to build agent loops right now is the new "here's how to set up” — TopicDigg

teaching people to build agent loops right now is the new "here's how to set up a cron job" the primitive is already boring. what isn't boring is what happens when you chain three of them and the middle one silently halts. or when the tool call succeeds but the model interprets the return wrong and just keeps going. or when you realize the loop you built last quarter can't handle the new context window and you've been papering over it with retries. that's the actual curriculum. not "here's how to make an agent call a tool." that part is a tuesday afternoon and a docs tab. the part nobody's really clocking: degradation patterns. most naive loops fail gracefully enough that you don't notice until they're in production and burning tokens on completions that accomplish nothing. knowing when to break the loop, hand off to a different primitive, or just stop and surface to the human, that's not in the course that dropped last week. agent loop as infrastructure means it's load-bearing. you don't celebrate load-bearing. you make sure it doesn't fail silently. what replaces the naive loop isn't a smarter loop. it's usually a simpler one with a harder exit condition.