Chosen by who they are for. Each source is dated. Most are opinions and experience reports. The Kohavi & Thomke article and the Kohavi, Tang & Xu book also report measured results. For the evidence, see research/02-evidence-cases.md.
- Ron Kohavi & Stefan Thomke, "The Surprising Power of Online Experiments", Harvard Business Review, Sep 2017. Why testing changes against the unchanged version beats intuition, with Microsoft and Bing examples. https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-surprising-power-of-online-experiments
- Andrew Ng, "Three key loops for building great software", The Batch, 26 Jun 2026 (date as shown on the page). Three loops running at different speeds (minutes, hours, days to weeks), and why people stay involved. https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/three-key-loops-for-building-great-software
- Anthropic, "Building effective agents", Dec 2024. When to use AI agents, and when not to: "This might mean not building agentic systems at all." https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents
- Kohavi, Tang & Xu, Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments, Cambridge University Press, 2020. The standard book on measuring changes properly. https://experimentguide.com/
- Addy Osmani, "Loop Engineering", 7 Jun 2026. The post that named the practice. https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/
- Anthropic, "Getting started with loops", 30 Jun 2026. Types of loops and how to bound them. https://claude.com/blog/getting-started-with-loops
- Geoffrey Huntley, "Ralph", Jul 2025. A loop in its simplest form, with lessons on tuning it. https://ghuntley.com/ralph/
- Andrej Karpathy, autoresearch, Mar 2026. A minimal working loop: change, test for 5 minutes, keep or discard, repeat. https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch
Always read one of these as well.
- Gergely Orosz, "What is loop engineering?", The Pragmatic Engineer, 14 Jul 2026 (paywalled). Most uses are scheduled or event-driven jobs, "useful, but don't feel like brand new workflows", and "Several devs reject looping after trying it." https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-loop-engineering
- Lulla, Treude, Baltes et al., "Loop Engineering: Building Blocks, Adoption, and Impact", arXiv, Aug 2026 (under review). Finds the benefits claimed so far rest on self-reports and anecdotes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21884
See research/04-papers.md for the list of academic papers.