Your AI Coding Agent is a While Loop With Delusions of Grandeur
The first time I used Claude Code to refactor an entire module, it felt almost mystical. I described what I wanted, went to grab a coffee, and when I came back, there was a pull request with 14 files changed, updated tests, and a decent commit message. “This is magic,” I thought. It’s not magic. It’s a while loop. Michael Bolin from OpenAI recently published an article dissecting the internals of Codex CLI. And it turns out that the secret behind AI coding agents isn’t a groundbreaking algorithm or an enigmatic neural network. It’s a loop that calls an LLM, executes tools, and repeats until there’s nothing left to do. ...