A book on loop engineering for the whole team
It’s about agentic engineering (of course). But it’s also for the whole team working on software products as well as practicing knowledge work.
I wrote a book! It’s called The Elastic Loop and it’s a framework for everyone delegating work to machines.
Yes, the book is about agentic engineering (of course). But it’s for the whole team working on software products as well as practicing knowledge work.
The industry has a name for part of this now: loop engineering. It’s the practice of building the loops you run agents in, and it belongs to the whole team, not just engineers (despite the name).
The Elastic Loop is my frame for the foundational skill every team needs today: a sizing strategy and tactics for helping software build itself.
Talk to anyone about agentic engineering (or agentic work) right now and it is productivity, productivity, oh, and productivity. It bores me to death. Of course speed is a lever. But why is no one talking about ambition and product quality? I think agents might be the biggest lever we ever had to work truly agile.
For an agent, working on something, is essentially a search problem. You define the solution space, the machine searches it, you grade what comes back. The moment you see it that way, it stops being an engineering-only topic!
A product owner who writes one sharp counterexample is defining the search. So is a domain expert whose war story explains why the obvious fix failed last time. A designer’s “this is off” is backpressure no test suite can produce. None of that is typing code! And all of it decides the outcome.
So, why write a book in 2026, when everyone just asks their agent how anything works?
I tried to write the kind I’d want. Write a book in the classic sense today and you are rewriting most of it in four weeks, which is a strange way to spend your spare time. Tactics move too fast to pin down. What moves slowly is the shape of the work: how far you can let a machine run before you look. That is the strategic layer where I aimed. Don’t mention ePub, PDF, Leanpub et al. It all feels like a burden in this new world.
OK. Who reads a book now? You, I hope. But also your agent, on your behalf. So I built it for both. Every page has a plain markdown twin, and the thing concatenates into one file an agent can swallow whole and carry straight into your turf. This is v1.0.
There’s also a companion skill you point at your team’s repo, your work material, your context. It grills you to prime itself. It reads the live book, then assesses your team: how much loop you can carry here, which sizes are available to you in this environment. Run it with the team, not for them.
And there is no newsletter. Why would I run one for a book your agent can read? Tell it to watch the changelog and ping you when something changes. It’ll manage.
Thank you to everyone who helped co-creating the book: customers, friends, co-workers, who challenged and sharpened the Elastic Loop in conversations and discussions since last autumn.
Build things that would not exist otherwise. The book is my attempt to say how.