Prompt Engineering was never the end goal. Welcome to Loop Engineering.

A good prompt matters, but it was never the whole job. Keeping a product reliable once real users show up is the hard part, and that is what quietly pulled the industry back toward feedback loops. First prompts, then context, and now the loops around both. Here is what loop engineering is, why it is everywhere now, and why it feels like software engineering making a comeback.

It started with prompts. For a couple of years that was the obsession, then demos turned into products and reality walked in. APIs fail, context gets messy, models make things up, long workflows drift. Getting one good answer is easy. Getting good answers over and over, at scale, while the world misbehaves, is where the real work starts, and it pulled everyone back toward the feedback loops software engineers have always relied on.