Your Agent Loop Should Know When to Stop Before It Starts
In June 2026, Peter Steinberger — creator of OpenClaw, now at OpenAI — posted a reminder that spread through engineering circles: "Here's your monthly reminder that you shouldn't be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt your agents." Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, made the same point independently: he no longer prompts Claude directly — he writes the loops that do the prompting for him.
The internet ran with it. The explainers followed — most of them converging on the same five-stage framework: Discover, Plan, Execute, Verify, Iterate.
What those explainers rarely treat as upfront design decisions: the stop condition, the memory schema, and the verification boundary. All three appear somewhere in the framework — Verify is step four, memory gets a paragraph, maker-checker gets a principle. What mostly doesn't appear is the argument that these three are decisions you make before the...
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