Plan → Act → Observe → Verify → Repair
Stop building agents that narrate completion. Start building systems that prove it.
In 2026 the conversation finally moved past “prompt engineering is dead.”
What replaced it is quieter, harder, and far more useful: loop engineering.
Most agents still fail the same way. They generate a confident final answer, declare victory, and leave the human to discover that half the work was invented, skipped, or never checked. We’ve all watched an agent burn five dollars in tokens just to confidently hallucinate a completely wrong API call or invent a tool result that never existed. The model is rarely the real problem anymore. The missing contract is.
