Hacker News

The Agentic Loop: Three loops in a trench coat

55 points by btables 7 hours ago | 11 comments

tptacek 2 hours ago

You can always find more loops if you want to write the next version of this post. Anything that runs software is a loop of instruction execution.

swyx 3 hours ago

there are more than 3: https://www.latent.space/p/loopcraft

jamestimmins 3 hours ago

The issue I have with loops is that for truly complex work, where I care about building a generalized solution for a complex problem, the agents frequently reward hack and end up burning indefinitely without finishing until I step in.

Curious how you're addressing this

btables 3 hours ago

Totally. Earth's rotation is a loop too. We should count that.

ratelimitsteve 3 hours ago

rotation and orbit, and technically the eccentricity in the axis as well

monocasa 2 hours ago

There's also at least the galactic orbit. There might be a very large scale orbit as well around the Great Attractor, but the jury's still bery much out on that one.

philipwhiuk 5 hours ago

Aren't the loops the wrong way round in the diagram. The tightest loop is the inference loop, then the tool loop and then human loop?

btables 5 hours ago

I think of them from the outside in, so that's why I illustrated it that way.

NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago

Fascinating. I think it's the first time I've heard it put that way.

For me it's more intuitive the other way around, as the "outer" loops increase in complexity (and can have additional separate loops running inside them). It also makes sense because you can always add more (meta) loops that way.

huflungdung 5 hours ago

[dead]

DonHopkins 4 hours ago

You are absolutely correct. It's an i18n/l10n issue. They spin in the opposite direction in the other hemisphere.

saghm 53 minutes ago

Oh no, what happens when I flush my agents from one hemisphere down the toilet in the other then?

draw_down 3 hours ago

[dead]