How to design AI agent loops: schedules, goals, and subagents in Claude Code and Codex

Prompts are out and loops are in. If your agent isn't able to prompt itself through an automation, what are you even doing? In today's episode, I'm gonna teach you what a prompt is in normal person speak, how to write one, when it's useful, and some pitfalls to watch out for. We will be doing this in codex and in Cloud Code. And at the end of this episode, you'll be one of the cool kids whose agents prompt itself. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your Copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using Work OS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Okay. So why are we all prompt maxing? Of course, it's Pete at Open Claw who told us we are old news if we are prompting, and we really need to be designing loops where our agents can prompt themselves. Now this one tweet spun off tons of content about what is a loop, how to use a loop. And to be honest, I don't think any of them explained it very well. So I am here to answer your safe space questions about what is a loop, how do I get one set up, is it really that useful, and should I really be letting my agents prompt itself. I think the answer is yes And, yes, there are tons of great use cases for loops, and we're gonna talk about how you can use those and how they can be beneficial, especially with software engineering. But there are some reasons why you wouldn't want to use loops. And honestly, I still do a little prompting. So don't worry if you are not loop maxing, you're in good company and you can still get a lot done with AI. So to answer what a loop is, I'm just gonna make this super simple for you all. And this goes back to one of the the earliest articles I wrote on OpenClaw, which was this article about why OpenClaw feels alive even though it's not. And the core of this article was …