Recently, Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, told an interviewer he'd stopped prompting the model by hand: "I don't prompt Claude anymore... My job is to write loops," (OfficeChai, 2026). For about a week my feeds treated that clip as proof loops are the next thing in AI coding. I'd been running one since March 2026, and the viral cut skipped the only part that's actually hard.
The Bootstrap Problem. I first ran into this pattern as a "Ralph Wiggum loop," before Cherny's clip made the rounds. Claude Code's /loop command and Copilot's "Automation" tab chase the same idea, but both are generic: wiring a real loop in Copilot CLI still means writing charters, skills, and routing from nothing, per project. That's boilerplate, the loop was supposed to remove it.
Squad is the bootstrap layer. Squad scaffolds an agent charter in a few commands, then you hand each agent the skills it needs. A loop.md file is read at the start of every cycle, self-directed or off a GitHub issue queue, and agents file their own issues when they find work outside scope. Mine runs 30 minutes on, 10 off (the break matters: less than 10 and the next cycle collides with a subagent still finishing background work).
