Loops Not Prompts: How AI Is Shifting From Chatty to Doing

A new piece from Rico Sanches is making the rounds in developer circles. The thesis is simple: stop obsessing over perfect prompts. Start building loops.

Instead of one elaborate prompt that tries to do everything, write code that generates an output, evaluates it, and loops back with a sharper prompt. Repeat. The system gets better on its own.

This is a real shift in how developers are thinking about AI. For years, the industry chased the perfect prompt — the one that could extract exactly what you needed from a model. Now the focus is moving to systems that run automatically, refining themselves over time.

The piece is worth a read if you're building anything with AI. It's not about replacing the prompt with code. It's about letting the loop do the heavy lifting.

Why this matters for us: the tools we're building for our communities — la migra app, translation tools, neighborhood directories — need to work without someone holding our hand through every step. Loops are how that happens.